Archive

Quotes

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

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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

—Karl Kraus, 1909

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 fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

—Francis Picabia, 1949

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

—Frederick Douglass, 1852

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

—Erasmus, 1518

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

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670