"The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others." -- Tyron Edwards

Kahlil Gibran "The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind." -- Kahlil Gibran

"Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers." --Josef Albers

"We should not teach children the sciences but give them a taste for them." -- Jean Jacques Rousseau

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." -- Benjamin Franklin

"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants." -- John Gardner

"We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction." -- Malcom Gladwell

"You must train the children to their studies in a playful manner and without any air of constraint with the further object of discerning more readily the natural bent of their respective characters." -- Plato

"Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." --William Butler Yeats

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, the excitement, and the mystery of the world we live in." --Rachel Carlson

"Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another." -- Marva Collins

"A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron." -- Horace Mann

"They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel." - Carol Buchner

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of becoming." -- Goethe

"It is not what is poured into a student that counts but what is planted." - Linda Conway

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

"Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it." -- William Haley

"The greatest sign of a success for a teacher...is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist." -- Maria Montessori

"In education it isn't how much you have committed to memory or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know and it's knowing how to use the information you get." --William Feather

"Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three." --Confucius

"No one but us ourselves - no one can and no one way. We ourselves must walk the path, teachers merely show the way." -- Nancy Wilson Ross

"A very wise old teacher once said: "I consider a day's teaching wasted if we do not all have one hearty laugh." He meant that when people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, jailer and prisoners. They become a single group of human beings enjoying its existence." -- Gilbert Highet

"One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child." -- Carl Jung

More Generally:

"If you want to live more, you must master the art of appreciating the little everyday blessings of life. This is not altogether a golden world but there are countless gleams of gold to be discovered in it." --Henry Alfred Porter

"Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny." -- Frank Outlaw

"Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered. It is something molded." -- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"To ensure that your work is also a play, I recommend that you develop a personal mission statement. This will help you find what it is to enjoy so much that you lose track of time when you're doing it." -- Ken Blanchard

"As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behavior. Begin to act the part of the person you would like to become. Take action on your behavior. Too many people want to feel, then take action. This never works." -- John C. Maxwell

"Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, you can achieve." -- Mary Kay Ash

"There are two kinds of people; those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there." -- Indira Gandhi

"Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything." -- Mary Hemingway

Christopher Reeve "I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles." -- Christopher Reeve

"Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Every time you wake up and ask yourself, "What good things am I going to do today?," remember that when the sun goes down at sunset, it takes a part of your life with it." --Indian proverb

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired." -- Mother Theresa

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I challenge you to make your life like a masterpiece. I challenge you to join the ranks of those people who live what they teach, who walk their talk." -- Anthony Robbins

"A hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of car I drove, what kind of house I lived in, how much money I had in the bank...but the world may be a better place because I made a difference in the life of a child." -- Forest Witchcraft

Keep sharing your light. -- Michelle Simtoco

Helen Keller "Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement, nothing can be done without hope and confidence." -- Helen Keller

"A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Thought flows in terms of stories -- stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best storytellers. We learn in the form of stories." -- Frank Smith

"Your role as a leader is even more important than you might imagine. You have the power to help people become winners." --Ken Blanchard

John F. Kennedy "Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation." -- John F. Kennedy

"If a seed of a lettuce will not grow, we do not blame the lettuce. Instead, the fault lies with us for not having nourished the seed properly." - Buddhist proverb

"There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything." --Maria Montessori

1. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

2. No Tenure.   No Pension:   A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office. (The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators. They serve their term(s), then go home and back to work. Serving in Congress is an honor & a privilege, not a career. Service is supposed to be for the benefit of the people & country, not themselves.)

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social security. (All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.)

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay should be tied to the average worker's pay.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congressmen can NOT receive any other pay, compensation, or favors of any type, from anyone, especially lobbyists, while in office.

This indeed would separate the men from the scum, and would eliminate the need for messing around with term limits and much other superficial, petty legislation. We could trust people if they were in there for the right reasons.

If everyone would contact their representatives (phone, email, letters) and tell them that they will only support & vote for representatives who will propose & support these policies, this is something that could make a difference.

If we do not start to turn things around soon, because of the current overwhelming debt (waste & corruption), there will be no avoiding major crisis, if it is not too late already.

If everyone passes this on to all of their contacts, it will not take very long for most people to receive the message, make a statement, and for congress and the president to GET THE POINT.

We need LESS GOVERNMENT - and more workers / producers.

"As Religion declines, Government grows."   -- Dennis Prager