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Quotes

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

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

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

—Joseph Stalin, 1934

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

—Karl Kraus, 1909

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

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

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

—Alice James, 1889

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. 

—John Updike, 1963

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

—George Santayana, 1905

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.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

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

—Erasmus, 1518

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? 

—François Rabelais, 1533

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.

—Herodotus, c. 440 BC

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC