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Quotes

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

—Erasmus, 1518

Repetition is the mother of education.

—Jean Paul, 1807

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670

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

—George Santayana, 1905

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

—Alice James, 1889

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

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

—Karl Kraus, 1909

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

—Joseph Stalin, 1934

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

I 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, 1970