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?
—François Rabelais, 1533Quotes
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.
—Ezra Pound, 1934The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
—Laurence Sterne, 1760My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.
—Leonard Cohen, 1970In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878Anyone 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.
—William Hazlitt, 1821In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
—E.M. Forster, 1951The 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.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.
—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC