In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897Quotes
Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.
—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BCEducation is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
—Joseph Stalin, 1934I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am.
—Alice James, 1889The 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 BCA whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981The 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, 1972Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth.
—Francis Picabia, 1949Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H.G. Wells, 1920In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.
—Erasmus, 1518