American Quotes

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.

One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy.

It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.

If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college.

Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.

While I've worked on many topics and written many books, I have not abandoned my interest in multiple intelligences.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.

The countries who do the best in international comparisons, whether it's Finland or Japan, Denmark or Singapore, do well because they have professional teachers who are respected, and they also have family and community which support learning.

The biggest communities in which young people now reside are online communities.

My belief in why America has been doing so well up to now is that we have been propelled by our immigrants and our encouragement of technical innovation and, indeed, creativity across the board.

Kids go to school and college and get through, but they don't seem to really care about using their minds. School doesn't have the kind of long term positive impact that it should.

If we were to abandon concern for what is true, what is false, and what remains indeterminate, the world would be totally chaotic. Even those who deny the importance of truth, on the one hand, are quick to jump on anyone who is caught lying.

I'd rather see the United States as a beacon of good work and good citizenship, rather than as #1 on some international educational measurement.

I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.

I am knowledgeable enough about the world of prizes to realize that there is a large degree of luck - both for the recognitions that you receive and those that you did not.

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.

By nature, I am not an optimist, though I try to act as if I am.

Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences.