“I am surprised and humbled and doubt whether I deserve the honour.”
US President Barack Obama on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 (October 9)
“If you had to explain Americas economic success in one word, that word would be ‘education.”
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman (New York Times, October 10)
Many industrialists who started in their garages with 20 students and one teacher, now have 20,000 students and 2,000 teachers. This is OK, since some education, however bad, is better than no education.
Well-known educationist Prof. N. Ramaswamy (Heritage-Cartman, October)
A university should have three kinds of freedom: whom to teach, what to teach and who will teach.
P.V. Indiresan, former director of IIT-Madras (India Today, October 12)
“If I was a person who is being dispossessed, whose wife has been raped, who is being pushed out of his land and who is being faced with this ‘police force, I would say that I am justified in taking up arms. If that is the only way I have to defend myself.”
Author and social activist Arundhati Roy on the rising incidence of Naxal violence (The Hindu, October 21)
“In the financial orgy that marked the Maharashtra elections, the media was never far behind the moneybags.”
P. Sainath (The Hindu, October 26)
“Denying a child access to education, amounts to not just marginalisation but to her virtual expulsion from society. Lack of education leads children to a dead end, foreclosing all options in adult life.”
Shantha Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, delivering a lecture at IIM-Bangalore (October 28)
“We need to push forward the reform process… The focus will be on increasing investment in rural infrastructure and education.”
Prime minister Manmohan Singh at the Hindustan Times Leader Summit (October 30)