David Geffen

[on Steve jobs] Our relationship was based almost always on him calling up and asking, ‘Is this a good deal?’ I’m not in his business, and I wasn’t trying to be. I was just a guy who admired him a lot and was flattered he wanted my advice.

The think I remember most about Brooklyn was how much I wanted to get out of Brooklyn.

[On his mother’s adversity] She had a very difficult beginning… All of my mothers family were killed… and she came to America at the time of the depression. It was not an easy life at all.

[To a psychedelic rock sextet call Strawberry Alarm Clock] We’re going to get you six Ed Sullivan shows and we’re going to get you on Janis Joplin’s next tour. [After the meeting on being told by Schiffman ‘David, what are you doing? Six Ed Sullivan shows? Are you kidding? Janis Joplin wouldn’t piss on these people! We are not going to give them any Janis Joplin dates’] If they have another hit, we’ll get them one Ed Sullivan show, and we’ll get them a couple of dates on somebody else’s tour. I don’t care. And if they don’t have another hit, well, f*ck ’em.

My father died in 1960. He was an intellectual. . . . She made the money and he read a lot. He wasn’t successful or ambitious. He spoke lots of languages. There were times that kids said to me, ‘What does your father do?’ and I had to make something up because I actually didn’t know what he did.

[In 1994] I wouldn’t offer $5 million to stop a book about me! It’s absurd. People will do anything for attention.

Learn something new every day.

My first task is to help students reject 18 years of poor learning that teaches them that knowledge is a product rather than a process.

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

Any man can learn anything he will, but no man can teach except to those who want to learn. Education is preeminently a matter of quality, not amount.

The function of this school is custodial. It’s here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

That experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.

As precious as knowledge itself is the learning. As precious as any reward is the earning.

Knowledge without education is but armed injustice.

A man’s college and university degrees mean nothing to me until I see what he is able to do with them.

As a community college professor for over twenty years, I’ve seen the determination, resilience and dedication of countless students. Regardless of circumstances, they show up. They work hard. They believe anything is possible.

I went to college on an art scholarship at the American Academy of Art, but the education comes from being passionate about objects, spaces, colors and the way they affect your senses.

Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime that ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer.

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

When girls are educated, their countries become stronger and more prosperous.