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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

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 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. 

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.

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 fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

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.

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

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