Archive

Quotes

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

—Camille Paglia, 1992

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

—George Santayana, 1905

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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.

—Herodotus, c. 440 BC

I 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, 1970

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

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

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.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

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

—W.H. Auden, 1947

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

—Erasmus, 1518

Repetition is the mother of education.

—Jean Paul, 1807