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.

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

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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.

Repetition is the mother of education.

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth.