When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense.

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.

Perhaps the most essential thing for a continuing education is to develop the capacity to know what you see and to understand what it means. Many people seem to go through life without seeing.

I am not a gifted person. I had only three assets: I was keenly interested, I accepted every challenge and every opportunity to learn more, and I had great energy and discipline.

Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left.

Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.

Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead.

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.

Optimizing return on capital will generate less growth than optimizing return on education.

My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, and Huntington's disease and neurofibromatosis.

I played golf with my friends, and then I started to play with the hustlers. And I learned a lot. I learned about golf; I learned about gambling. I learned about everything.