Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

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

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? 

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

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.

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

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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