Life & Mortality Quote by Bryant H. McGill

McGill draws a hard, almost moral line between the hungry and the credentialed: the “truly educated” are the ones for whom not knowing feels like suffocation. That opening clause, “would die without knowing,” is melodramatic on purpose. It reframes learning as appetite, not achievement, and it quietly shames the kind of education that treats curiosity as optional. In an era where school often functions as a sorting machine - grades, GPAs, rankings, résumés - he’s arguing that the real dividing line isn’t intelligence but necessity: do you need understanding the way you need air?

The jab at “the masses in the institutions” isn’t just anti-school rhetoric; it’s a critique of institutional choreography. “Going through the motions” evokes compliance, performance, and box-checking - students as consumers, teachers as content-delivery, campuses as factories of measurable outcomes. The subtext is that institutions can’t guarantee education because they can’t manufacture desire. They can only certify attendance.

Then he pivots: “education is a way of living.” That’s the quote’s real payload. It rejects the clean boundaries of syllabus-to-exam learning and insists that education is behavioral: how you read, question, revise, notice, and stay unsettled. In contemporary culture - where information is abundant, incentives are transactional, and “learning” is often rebranded as productivity - McGill is defending a more intimate ethic: education as a daily practice, not a stage of life, and not a membership in a system.