In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897Quotes
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.
—John Updike, 1963Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
—Joseph Stalin, 1934My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
—Laurence Sterne, 1760I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.
—Leonard Cohen, 1970Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
—E.M. Forster, 1951What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper?
—François Rabelais, 1533I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am.
—Alice James, 1889Repetition is the mother of education.
—Jean Paul, 1807It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.
—Erasmus, 1518A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909