Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
False hope is worse than despair.
When I was young, I was religious.
Discrimination is alive and soaring.
Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.
The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
It is our nation which is blind, and needs our prayers.
I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
Young children give us glimpses of some things that are eternal.
I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.
Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.
Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.
Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.
I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations
Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.
You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.
Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.
In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.
My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.
The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.
President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.
I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
In many of the high schools in the South Bronx, more children will end up in prison than will go to college.
Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.
All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.
In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.
We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.
I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.
It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.
I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.
A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.
The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.
Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'
The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty to our own kind.
I have always felt my role was to do anything I could to enable the powerless to speak. I want America to hear these voices because they are beautiful voices.
I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.
Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.
Even if you never do anything about this, you've benefited from an unjust system. You're already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start.
I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.
I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.
We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.
Now, I don't expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted.
No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.