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

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

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

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

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

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.

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. 

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.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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

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