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

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. 

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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? 

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.