In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878Quotes
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.
—Erasmus, 1518It 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.
—Frederick Douglass, 1852My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
—Camille Paglia, 1992Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.
—Ezra Pound, 1934Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth.
—Francis Picabia, 1949Anyone 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.
—William Hazlitt, 1821The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana, 1905A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909The 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.
—John Updike, 1963The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
—Laurence Sterne, 1760