Archive

Quotes

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

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

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

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

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

—Ezra Pound, 1934

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

—Erasmus, 1518

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

—George Santayana, 1905

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

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, 1963

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

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

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878