Archive

Quotes

Repetition is the mother of education.

—Jean Paul, 1807

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? 

—François Rabelais, 1533

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.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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

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

—Joseph Stalin, 1934

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

—Camille Paglia, 1992

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

—Alice James, 1889

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.

—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75

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

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

—W.H. Auden, 1947

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

—George Santayana, 1905

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920