"When I started the Imagination Library in..." - Quote by Dolly Parton

“I've always been fascinated by everything with wings.”

“Being born was the worse and the first mistake I ever made. The doctor didn't spank me, he just slapped me in the face.”

“It's not easy being young. It's hard to know what to do.”

“Thinking about impact on children meant adding to the agenda, both the R&D agenda and the delivery agenda, but it's amazing news, even in the scale of other tragedies.”

“Effective philanthropy requires a lot of time and creativity - the same kind of focus and skills that building a business requires.”

“In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.”

“A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly, for nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.”

“In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing.”

“The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.”