- “The concept of the normal curve and the notion that most people are average are ideas that have a devastating effect in school. They condemn to mediocrity all but the few. What one needs to understand is that nothing short of excellence should be expected of anyone.”
- “People are the chief resources in the education enterprise.”
- “The idea of distributing students into classrooms comprised of thirty or so youngsters and a single teacher is an accident of history rather than a calculated decision.”
- “Perhaps the most important understanding here is that students are volunteers, whether we want them to be or not. Their attendance can be commanded, but their attention must be earned. Their compliance can be insisted on, but their commitment is under their own control.”
- "Values and vision rather than programs and rules will drive the system."
- “It seems to me that educators — following the lead of persons like Terry Deal, Tom Sergiovanni, Michael Fullan, and a few others — need to study more systematically transformational leadership in education. In the meantime, I take most of my inspiration in such matters from the literature in business, biographies of great transformational leaders, and the reading of history, plays, and novels.”
- "Educators must prepare themselves to totally reinvent the American system of education."
- “We need educators who are comfortable in working on the cutting edge of ignorance as well as those who work on the cutting edge of knowledge. We must envision education systems unlike any that have existed before and busy ourselves with the task of creating them.”
- “When families and communities lose control of the education of the youth, they have lost control of the future, and with this loss of control comes, almost certainly, the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian system of information control. School reform is a civic matter as well as a matter of economic concern.”
