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.

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

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

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

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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. 

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

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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.

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