If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

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

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

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.