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About this quote

What does it mean?
Roosevelt warns that educating minds without morals creates dangerous individuals harmful to society.
In plain terms
Intelligence without morals is dangerous.
What can you take from it?
Intelligence without morals is dangerous.

Where it applies

  • educational policy
  • parenting
  • professional ethics

Putting it to work

  • integrate ethics in teaching
  • evaluate character

Questions to consider

  • Can knowledge exist without morals?
  • How to teach ethics?

Another view

Some moral learning can occur outside formal education.

More from Theodore Roosevelt

  1. There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at sometime, on some point, that devil masters each of us; he who has never failed has never been tem…

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  2. We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrin…

    Permalink to quote #134
  3. There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility.

    Permalink to quote #131

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