Top 40 Robert M. Hutchins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

2. “The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

3. “Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

4. “My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

5. “Most people spend their time on the ‘urgent’ rather than on the ‘important.’”

— Robert M. Hutchins

6. “Football, fraternities, and fun have no place in the university. They were introduced only to entertain those who shouldn’t be in the university.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

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7. “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

8. “When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

9. “Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

10. “The best education for the best is the best education for all.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

11. “Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

12. “Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching – without these a university cannot exist.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

13. “A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive short-wave facilities scattered; about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

14. “The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

15. “Whenever the urge to exercise comes upon me, I lie down for a while and it passes.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

16. “Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

17. “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

18. “On the principle laid down by Gilbert and Sullivan that when everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody; if everybody is abnormal, we don’t need to worry about anybody.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

19. “More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife – and watch TV.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

20. “We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

21. “Nature will not forgive those who fail to fulfill the law of their being. The law of human beings is wisdom and goodness, not unlimited acquisition.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

22. “Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

23. “Anybody who feels at ease in the world today is a fool.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

24. “Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

25. “A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

26. “For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

27. “It has been said that we have not had the three R’s in America, we had the six R’s; remedial readin’, remedial ‘ritin’ and remedial ’rithmetic.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

28. “America’s experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

29. “Too few have the courage of my convictions.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

30. “A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

31. “Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

32. “The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

33. “The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

34. “We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg’s great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

35. “Whether four years of strenuous attention to football and fraternities is the best preparation for professional work has never been seriously investigated.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

36. “We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

37. “It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

38. “When we listen to the radio, look at television and read the newspapers we wonder whether universal education has been the great boon that its supporters have always claimed it would be.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

39. “To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

40. “There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

41. “The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

42. “College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

43. “Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.”

— Robert M. Hutchins

44. “This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you’ve got it when you can’t think of anything that’s your fault.”

— Robert M. Hutchins