Robert Maynard Hutchins: Quotes about books

“Because of experimental science we know a very large number of things about the natural world of which our predecessors were ignorant. In the great books we can observe the birth of science, applaud the development of the experimental technique, and celebrate the triumphs it has won. But we can also note the limitations of the method and mourn the errors that its misapplication has caused. We can distinguish the outlines of those great persistent problems that the method … may never solve and find the clues to their solutions offered by other methods and other disciplines.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , World , Error , Birth

“If many great books seem unreadable and unintelligible … it may be because we have not for a long time learned to read by reading them. Great books teach people not only how to read them, but how to read all other books.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

People , Books , Learning , Time

“If only the specialist is to be allowed access to these books, on the ground that it is impossible to understand them without "scholarship," … then we shall be compelled to shut out the majority of mankind from some of the finest creations of the human mind. This is aristocracy with a vengeance.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , Understanding

“The great books … afford us the best examples of man's efforts to seek the truth, both about the nature of things and about human conduct, by methods other than those of experimental science; and because these examples are presented in the context of equally striking examples of man's efforts to learn by experiment … the great books provide us with the best materials for judging whether the experimental method is or is not the only acceptable method of inquiry into all things.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Truth , Books , Nature , Effort

“The Great Books show … that even those thinkers of the past who are now often looked upon as the most reactionary, the medieval theologians, insisted, as Aristotle had before them, that the truth of any statement is its conformity to reality or fact, and that sense experience is required to discover the particular matters of fact that test the truth of general statements about the nature of things.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Truth , Books , Nature , Reality

“One voice in the Great Conversation itself announces this modern point of view. In the closing paragraph of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume writes: "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume… let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."… the positivists of our own day, would commit to burning or, what is the same, to dismissal from serious consideration… Those books… argue the case against the kind of positivism that asserts that everything except mathematics and experimental science is sophistry and illusion…. The Great Conversation… contains both sides of the issue.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , Mathematics , Understanding , Science

“The dogma of individual differences. This is one of the basic dogmas of American education. It runs something like this: all men are different; therefore, all men require a different education; therefore, anybody who suggests that education should be in any respect the same has ignored the fact that all men are different; therefore, nobody should suggest that everybody should read some of the same books; some people should read some books, some should read others. This dogma has gained such a hold … that you will often now hear a college president boast that his college has no curriculum. Each student has a course of study framed, or "tailored" … to meet his own individual needs and interests.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Men , People , Books , Education

“As Whitehead has said "If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it is cannot be educational. In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place."”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , Education

“The facts are indispensable; they are not sufficient. To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect. Even the experimental scientist cannot avoid being a liberal artist, and the best of them, as the great books show are men of imagination and of theory as well as patient observers of particular facts. … critics have themselves frequently misunderstood the scientific method and have confused it with the aimless accumulation of facts.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Men , Books , Imagination , Problem

“In the course of history … new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation. … the West needs to recapture and reemphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Wisdom , Men , Books , History

“There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader: he can never fully comprehend it. That is why these books are great teachers; they demand the attention of the reader and keep his intelligence on the stretch.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , Intelligence , Sense , Teachers

“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 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 tradition.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , Education

“The contemporary practices of scientific research, as well as the scientific efforts that the great books record, show beyond doubt that the method of controlled experiment under artificial conditions is not the only method used by men who regard themselves and are regarded as scientists. … as the work of astronomers, biologists, and social scientists reveals, experiment in the strict sense is not always possible.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Men , Books , Sense , Effort

“Great books are great teachers; they are showing us every day what ordinary people are capable of. These books come out of ignorant, inquiring humanity. They are usually the first announcements for success in learning. Most of them were written for, and addressed to, ordinary people.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

People , Books , Learning , Teachers