A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

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

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

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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

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

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

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

That which is evil is soon learned.