Archive

Quotes

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

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

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

—Erasmus, 1518

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

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

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

—Francis Picabia, 1949

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

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

—George Santayana, 1905

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