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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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