51 Quotes by S. I. Hayakawa

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

There is only one thing age can give you, and that is wisdom.

English is the key to full participation in the opportunities of American life.

Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.

The last thing a scientist would do is cling to a map because he inherited it from his grandfather, or because it was used by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

Good teachers never say anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place.