Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.

Here is the treasure chest of the world - the public library, or a bookstore.

If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.

The ordinary American - as far as I can tell - knows so much less than he did fifty years ago and has such poor work habits compared with fifty years ago that the average multiplicand of knowledge/capabilities is a much smaller number than it was in 1961.

Ignorance never settles a question.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about.

You always fear when you're making a movie that has a moral to the story that people are going to reject the idea of being taught a lesson.

There's nothing so heavy as books, sir--unless it's bricks.

I'm half-and-half on school. I had fun in grade school, but when I went to college, it was the worst place I've ever been in my entire life.

If the universities—the supposed citadels of reason, knowledge, scholarship, civilization—can be made to surrender to the rule of brute force, the rest of the country is cooked.

The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug's gun—at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.

You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!