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

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

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

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