“My system is to be considered a system leading up, in a general way, to education. It can be followed not only in the education of little children from three to six years of age, but can be extended to children up to ten years of age.”

I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.

It is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method… I have studied the child; I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it, and that is what is called the Montessori Method.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it.

Indeed there are powers in the small child that are far greater than is generally realized, because it is in this period that the construction, the building-up, of man takes place, for at birth, psychically speaking, there is nothing at all – zero!

We all know the sense of comfort of which we are conscious when a good half of the floor space in a room is unencumbered; this seems to offer us the agreeable possibility of moving about freely.

It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes.

The man of character is the persistent man, the man who is faithful to his own word, his own convictions, his own affections.

We cannot create observers by saying ‘observe’, but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.

Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.

We await the successsive births in the soul of the child. We give all possible material, that nothing may lack to the groping soul, and then we watch for the perfect faculty to come, safeguarding the child from interruption so that it may carry its efforts through.

Dependence is not patriotism. A man does not love his mother if he hangs about her to the point of burdening her with a weak, feckless son.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?

We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.

Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

The child who concentrates is immensely happy.

People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.

I think you just learn a lot of stuff in general about all the stuff he [Edward Snowden] released. I think there’s probably a lot that we don’t know. That’s what is really interesting.

I’ll eat anything. I love food in general. I love traditional Mexican, carne asada. Just meat, beans, rice, and some good salsa.

The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.

Women, in general, are not part of the corruption of the past, so they can give a new kind of leadership, a new image for mankind.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

There need to be more women supporting women. Not just in fashion, in general.

No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.