A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Quotes
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903It 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, 1852Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W.H. Auden, 1947Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.
—Ezra Pound, 1934What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper?
—François Rabelais, 1533Repetition is the mother of education.
—Jean Paul, 1807It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.
—Erasmus, 1518The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana, 1905Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
—Camille Paglia, 1992Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
—E.M. Forster, 1951I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am.
—Alice James, 1889Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
—Joseph Stalin, 1934