Nicholas Murray Butler quotes

Nicholas Murray Butler was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator who served as president of Columbia University for over four decades. His work influenced both educational reform and international diplomacy, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize. He left a significant legacy in higher education and global peace efforts. Here are 28 of his quotes:

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

Nicholas Murray Butler

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method-more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records-of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

Nicholas Murray Butler

The world is divided into three kinds of people: A very small group that makes things happen; a somewhat larger group that watches things happen; and a great multitude that never knows what has happened.

Nicholas Murray Butler

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Time was invented by the Almighty God in order to give ideas a chance.

Nicholas Murray Butler

The more that one studies the history of the building of the American nation, the clearer it becomes that it may be justly described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the world problems of tomorrow.

Nicholas Murray Butler

On the eve of that going out, we gather to participate in this stately and solemn service to Almighty God, in Whose name this University was founded and in Whose name it has labored from generation to generation... Wherever the cause of liberty is in danger, there Columbia's hand will be found to help avert it. Wherever the rule of despotism is extending, there Columbia's hand will be found to remove It. Wherever there is need of scientific skill and genius to serve, to cure, to invent, to construct, there a Columbia hand will be found ready to do its duty for the advancement of the public good and for the glory of Almighty God.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Necessity does the work of courage.

Nicholas Murray Butler

There was a time when philosophy might have been defined as the science of human activity, so all-comprehensive was it. The ambitious Greek who would attach his name to a philosophical system must include in his scheme all that could be known, done, and speculated about God, the world, and man. In the course of time and the specialization of the sciences this view of philosophy fell away, and was replaced by the more exact and narrower conception of modern times.

Nicholas Murray Butler

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Until the family and the church can be roused to the full height of their responsibility we cannot expect to find the youth of the land in possession of that religious knowledge and religious feeling which were characteristic of their ancestors two or three generations ago.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Where the forms of civil, religious and political liberty still exist, they must be strengthened and given new power over the hearts as well as over the minds of men. Faith must not be lost, and courage must not be lacking. The call is for every civilized human being who believes in justice, in liberty and in public morals. The bell is ringing!

Nicholas Murray Butler

1. The human mind is so constructed that it must see every perception in a time-relation-in an order-and every perception of an object in a space-relation-as outside or beside our perceiving selves. 2. These necessary time-relations are reducible to Number, and they are studied in the theory of number, arithmetic and algebra. 3. These necessary space-relations are reducible to Position and Form, and they are studied in geometry. Mathematics, therefore, studies an aspect of all knowing, and reveals to us the universe as it presents itself, in one form, to mind. To apprehend this and to be conversant with the higher developments of mathematical reasoning, are to have at hand the means of vitalizing all teaching of elementary mathematics.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Both anti-Semitism and the Ku Klux Klan are an insult to democracy and a contradiction of it. But faith honest, sincere, hopeful, opens a door to moving forward in this new and very difficult world in which our children must live. It opens the door into that world in a spirit inspired by something more than the merely human, the gain-seeking and the temporary. It brings us, our children and our grandchildren, in touch with the eternal verities which are the only possible foundation for a civilization and a life that are worthy of human ambition and human endeavor.

Nicholas Murray Butler

The United States is in sore need today of an aristocracy of intellect and service. Because such an aristocracy does not exist in the popular consciousness, we are bending the knee to the golden calf of money. The form of monarchy and its pomp offer a valuable foil to the worship of money for its own sake. A democracy must provide itself with a foil of its own and none is better or more effective than an aristocracy of intellect and service.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Many definitions have been given of the word "education,” but underlying them all is the conception that it denotes an attempt on the part of the adult members of a human society to shape the development of the coming generation in accordance with its own ideals of life. It is true that the word has not infrequently been used in wider senses than this.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Many peoples' tombstones should read 'Died at 30, burried at 60.'

Nicholas Murray Butler

There are many things that go to make up an education, but there are just two things without which no man can ever hope to have an education and these two things are character and good manners.

Nicholas Murray Butler

The youth of today and the youth of tomorrow will be accorded an almost unequaled opportunity for great accomplishment and for human service.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

Nicholas Murray Butler

To exclude religious teaching altogether from education... is a very dangerous and curious tendency. The result is to give paganism a new importance and influence.

Nicholas Murray Butler