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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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 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.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.