Alfred Whitney Griswold Quotations

A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience.

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail

This man, Comrades, has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth.

The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources.... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement.... They are the wellsprings of a free society.

A Socrates in every classroom.

Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones.

Could Hamlet have been written bya committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the NewTestament have been composed as a conference report?

There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled.

Certain things we cannot accomplish... by any process of government. We cannot legislate intelligence. We cannot legislate morality. No, and we cannot legislate loyalty, for loyalty is a kind of morality.