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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

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

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

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

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

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

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?