Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am.