It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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.