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.

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

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.

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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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

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

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.