I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.
Interpretation
Education should empower individuals to think independently and critically.
In this quote, Robin Williams emphasizes the true purpose of education as a means to cultivate independent thinking rather than merely accumulating knowledge. He advocates for an educational approach that encourages students to question, analyze, and form their own opinions, fostering creativity and individuality.
In practice
In a speech about educational reform, one might quote this to highlight the importance of nurturing independent thought in students.
It's that idea that you can have one drink - and no you can't. Within a week I was drinking heavily. It was so quick that even I was like, 'Wow.' Because you have that initial warm feeling going, 'Oh, I remember this'. And your body does, too. And your body goes, 'Yeah, so do I'. Then the demon voice comes, 'Yeah, so do I. You know what would be great? You know we bought a little bottle before? A full bottle would be wonderful'.
Sometimes over things that I did, movies that didn't turn out very well - you go, 'Why did you do that?' But in the end, I can't regret them because I met amazing people. There was always something that was worth it.
I've never been asked to appear on 'I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!,' so I guess I mustn't be on the professional skids just yet.
The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying, 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and yelling, 'You want a piece of me?'
I write on big yellow legal pads - ideas in outline form when I'm doing stand-up and stuff. It's vivid that way. I can't type it into an iPad - I think that would put a filter into the process.
Beer commercials usually show big men, manly men, doing manly things: "You've just killed a small animal. It's time for a light beer." Why not have a realistic beer commercial, with a realistic thing about beer, where someone goes, "It's 5:00 in the morning. You've just pissed on a dumpster. It's Miller time."
It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.
You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.
Kids ask me questions. You'd think after doing this for four years, I would have heard every single question anyone could think of to ask, but no, every time, they surprise me, they ask me something I never thought of before.
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
All readers are tourists. We want to make sense of what we see and hear, to find the balance between what is unknown and what we can call ours.
...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.
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