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

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

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.

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

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

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. 

Repetition is the mother of education.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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.

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.