The Last Word

Monday, September 20, 2004

Be a giver. You were admitted to Dartmouth because you were great—valedictorians, captains, and club presidents. So chances are, you're going to be in a position in your lives where people look at you for leadership. In the past, being great meant you had lead by giving orders. Today it means you can just lead by giving.
—Jeffrey Immelt, at Dartmouth

Sir, I know not how others may feel but, for myself, when I see my alma mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate house, by those who are reiterating stab upon stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me and say,—et tu quoque, mi fili—and thou too my son.
—Daniel Webster

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.
—Henry Brooks Adams

By the Gospel he subdued the / ferocity of the savage, / And to the civilized he opened / new paths of Science. / Traveler, go if you can / and deserve the sublime reward / of such merit.
—Eleazar Wheelock's Epitaph

There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third.
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three/ (Which was rather late for me) — / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP.
—Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
—Tallulah Bankhead

Wit is educated insolence.
—Aristotle

I know on September 11th, we were all evacuated from the building, and we found ourselves standing outside—most of us. I was whisked away with no place to go. We ended up on the top floor of the police headquarters. We pulled the shades down, thinking that might make us more secure.
—Tom Daschle

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.
—Amos Bronson Alcott

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned in school.
—Albert Einstein

At what point could heroic displays of kindness penetrate the emotionally hijacked minds that prompt terrorists to commit crimes against humanity or even get prospective terrorists to check themselves?
—Tommy Lee Woon

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.
—Abbott Lawrence Lowell

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
—Peter DeVries

This American system of ours… call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.
—Al Capone

A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job.
—Caroline Bird

As surgeons keep their instruments and knives always at hand for cases requiring immediate treatment, so shouldst thou have thy thoughts ready to understand things divine and human, remembering in thy every act, even the smallest, how close is the bond that unites the two.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Great cities must be obliterated from the earth.
—Otto von Bismarck

Live that you can look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell.
—John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at Dartmouth

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
—Eric Hoffer

Every man has the right to utter what he thinks is the truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
—Samuel Johnson

The Last Word

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