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 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. 

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? 

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

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.

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