Bill Vaughn

I’ve seen with my own students, community colleges offer an affordable route to four-year college degrees and good paying jobs.

Being a teacher is not what I do, it’s who I am.

There is no education like adversity.

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

Perhaps because my father never got a college degree himself, he continued to view people who had one with a respect that bordered on awe. In most cases they didn’t deserve it. My father could run circles around most academics and he would have done very well in college, if he’d been able to go.

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

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee you that.

An educated person, I think, is one who not only knows a lot, but knows how to do a lot of things.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

Over the years, I have again and again asked fellow believers in a free society how they managed to escape the contagion of their collectivist intellectual environment. No name has been mentioned more often as the source of enlightenment than Friedrich Hayek’s.

That’s the way to study history-by noting evolutionary processes.

No task before our nation is more important than expanding and improving the educational opportunities of all our people. The concept that every American deserves the opportunity to attain the highest level of education of which he is capable is not new to this Administration – it is a traditional ideal of democracy. But it is time that we moved toward the fulfillment of this ideal with more vigor and less delay. For education is both the foundation and the unifying force of our democratic way of life – it is the mainspring of our economic and social progress – it is the highest expression of achievement in our society, ennobling and enriching human life. In short, it is at the same time the most profitable investment society can make and the richest reward it can offer.

[On his donation of $100 million to UCLA in 2012 adding to the $200 million he donated in 2002] The cost of a world-class medical education should not deter our future innovators, doctors and scientists from the path they hope to pursue. We need the students at this world-class institution to be driven by determination and the desire to do their best work and not by the fear of crushing debt. I hope in doing this that others will be inspired to do the same.

All students can learn and succeed, but not on the same day in the same way.

The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.