“I think it's hard to learn democracy when we make children prisoners until they're nineteen years old.”

“To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books, It's better to be giving books to children than drug treatment to them when they're 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?”

“I don't want to give advice to a 19-year-old, because I want a 19-year-old to make mistakes and learn from them. Make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes. Just make sure they're your mistakes.”

“When I was nineteen,I told a thirty-year-old man what afool I had been whenI was seventeen.'We were always,' hesaid glancing down, 'afool two years ago.”

“...Med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It's not until the second year that they learn the cures.”

“Why don't we want our children to learn to do mathematics? Is it that we don't trust them, that we think it's too hard? We seem to feel that they are capable of making arguments and coming to their own conclusions about Napoleon. Why not about triangles?”