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.

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.

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

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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.