Alexandra Robbins Quotes

Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.

I'm used to being told what to say, but not what to think... that's usually left up to me.

The kids are not brought up to have minds of their own as individuals.

I'm a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

Our schools too often want to shut people up so they can't talk about real solutions. People who think differently tend to clam up because they think something is wrong with their ideas.

Now, we don't teach children in schools to be creative. We don't teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

If there is a flaw in the academy system it's that they try to tell them everything. Kids are taught the same. They look the same. So you're constantly looking for the X factor. It's the hardest thing, that mystical ingredient, instinct, the four-second hit, like/dislike, it can come unbelievably quickly.

Just because everybody else does something isn't a good enough reason to do anything.

My message to women is it's okay not to toe the party line on every issue. You don't have to be a puppet or a mouthpiece for your party on every issue. You can be an independent thinker; you can take it issue by issue, and that's okay. You shouldn't be told, 'You can't sit with us.'

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.