In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

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

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

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.

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

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

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

Anyone 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.

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

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

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. 

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