A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

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

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. 

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

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

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? 

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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