Quotes from Robert M. Hutchins

More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife - and watch TV.

Most people spend their time on the 'urgent' rather than on the 'important.'

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

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

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

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.

A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive short-wave facilities scattered; about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.

The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.

Whether four years of strenuous attention to football and fraternities is the best preparation for professional work has never been seriously investigated.

The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.

Too few have the courage of my convictions.

...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

The best education for the best is the best education for all.

We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.