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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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

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.

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.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.