Quotes from Robert Maynard Hutchins

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.

The art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them, but do not

A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.

Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.

The state is valuable if it helps to maximize profits, but is apparently to have little part in economic life beyond this and beyond fulfilling functions which are too big or too unprofitable for private enterprise.

Childhood and youth are no time to get an education. They are the time to get ready to get an education.

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.

If a society does not wish to change, it cannot be reformed through the educational system.

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist