Lyndon B. Johnson

We believe, that is, you and I, that education is not an expense. We believe it is an investment.

Poverty has many roots, but the taproot is ignorance.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

It is a truism that education is no longer a luxury. Education in this day and age is a necessity.

We are now embarked on another venture to put the American dream to work in meeting the new demands of a new day. Once again we must start where men would improve their society have always known they must begin – with an educational system restudied, reinforced, and revitalized.

Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today’s youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. College enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

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.

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

Higher education cannot be a luxury reserved just for a privileged few. It is an economic necessity for every family. And every family should be able to afford it.

Community colleges are certainly one of America’s best-kept secrets.

I call myself a teacher because they want me to call myself a teacher, but actually, what I’m doing is I’m studying.

Many of my students don’t know that I’m second lady of the United States… because, you know, it’s a community college.

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

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

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.

You must unlearn what you have learned.

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.

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.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

There is no education like adversity.