The Great Conversation Quotes

“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 Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education

“Childhood and youth are no time to get an education. They are the time to get ready to get an education.”
― Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education

“If a society does not wish to change, it cannot be reformed through the educational system.”
― Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education

“Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.”
― Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education