William Gaddis

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

We want someone to bring us the news.

If you want to make a million you don’t have to understand money, what you have to understand is people’s fears about money.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there’s always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!

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

I would like to be a scholar in whatever I do, a scholar is never finished, he is always seeking and I am always seeking.

Education can’t focus only on developing our wonderful brain. We also need warm-heartedness. This is my view.

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I’ve dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half… I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop…. I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn’t do it for fifteen.

Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.

But before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of Education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of Society nearer to the higher. The Education of a Nation, instead of being confined to a few schools & Universities, for the instruction of the few, must become the National Care and expence, for the information of the Many.

… because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college.

Do not neglect your life skills, which should include a healthy dose of financial education.

In addition to an education, kids were supposed to graduate with some basic values, self-discipline, and life skills. A little common sense wouldn’t hurt either. Our schools don’t teach that anymore, instead we’re more concerned about kids having self-esteem and feeling good about themselves than we are about preparing them for real life. The politically correct crowd has taken over our schools, and as a result we are failing our children.

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.

My last year in high school, I worked at a bindery, side by side with grown-ups who had been there their entire lives. Knowing that I, as a 16-year-old, was getting the same income and doing the same work… it gave me respect for those workers. But it also gave me an understanding that more is needed for folks to be able to cobble together a decent life on minimum wage.

Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.