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? 

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

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.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

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

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.