"What but education has advanced us beyond..." - Quote by Thomas Jefferson
What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that they are to look backward for better things and not forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?
More by Thomas Jefferson
“Taste cannot be controlled by law. We must resist at all costs any attempt to regulate our individual freedoms and to legislate our personal moralities.”
“The ocean ... like the air, is the common birth-right of mankind.”
“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”
More on Education
“I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood. When somebody called me a 'dirty little Guinea', there was only one thing to do-break his head. When I got older, I realized that you shouldn't do it that way. I realized that you've got to do it through education. Children are not to blame. It is the parents. How can a child know whether his playmate is an Italian, a Jew or Irish, unless the parents have discussed it in the privacy of their homes.”
“I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.”
“Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.”
More on Progress
“In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake.”
“If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.”
“Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.”