"But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts
and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for
the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture,
for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for
the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of
indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of
regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what
is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental
courage and mental soberness." 

-William Johnson Cory (1861)

"The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise
can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a
location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the
opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our
comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality
even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to
transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom."

-bell hooks (1994)