SELF-EDUCATION

MANSFIELD'S BOOK OF MANLY MEN (139-148)

• If we asked men today to list the duties or disciplines that comprise true manhood, most would not include the learning or the acquisition of knowledge. This signals a tragic failure to understand the traits that make a great man.
• The truth is that most great men in history have become great because the aggressively pursued knowledge.
• Winston Churchill read so ravenously when he was a young officer in India that a biographer later wrote that "he became his own university
• Lincoln read every book he could buy or borrow on the Illinois frontier, enlisted tutors, followed lecturers from town to town and worked late into many a night to master a philosophy, understand a mathematical formula, or memorize a poem.
• Benjamin Franklin taught himself five languages and formed a junto of young Philadelphia journeymen who met regularly to teach each other in hopes of rising in society.
• Thomas Jefferson taught himself seven languages, including Arabic. 
• Devotion to self-education is unquestionably one of the marks of an exceptional man. Passive men wait for knowledge to come to them. Weak men assume what they need to know will seek them out. Men of great character and drive search out the knowledge they need.
• No one exemplifies this in recent history like Harry truman, the only president of the twentieth century who did not have a college degree.
• "The thing I found out from reading was there is damn little information in most schoolbooks worth a damn..."
• "Historians editorializing is in the same class as the modern irresponsible columnist. So study men, not historians."
• In a meeting with numbers eminent ambassadors, he once sketched out the differences between the major religions of the world on a napkin, impressing-and educating-men with degrees from Harvard and Yale.
• He did not rely on society to provide this knowledge. He roared after it, dug it out one his own, and did not rest until he understood what he needed to understand in order to live and to lead.
• Learning is a joy. Reading is one of the great pleasures of life. A man ought to invest in knowledge because it is part of living in this world fully engaged and glorifying God.