Archive

Quotes

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

—Joseph Stalin, 1934

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

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

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

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

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

—Alice James, 1889

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

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

—Karl Kraus, 1909

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

—Erasmus, 1518

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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

—Ezra Pound, 1934

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.

—Frederick Douglass, 1852

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

—E.M. Forster, 1951

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.

—William Hazlitt, 1821