Quotes from William Glasser

Don't marry someone you would not be friends with if there was no sex between you.

We may be up against a stone wall, but we don't have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to.

They have this big book called the 'DSM-IV,' you know, that is supposedly written about crazy people, but I think it is a book that is written by crazy people!

Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.

The ultimate use of power is to empower others.

Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.

I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge.

If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.

Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.

If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.

We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.

Caring for but never trying to own may be a further way to define friendship.

Using no control and using humor will build a relationship and make a dent to where the client puts the counselor in their quality world and then begins to relate and seek out the counselor. Effective therapy begins with the acceptance of the therapist into the client's quality world.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.

In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.

You can acquire a lot of knowledge without ever going to school.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

We can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can't relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he'll never be a competent teacher.

Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.

I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture.