Archive

Quotes

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

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

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

—Alice James, 1889

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

—Joseph Stalin, 1934

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

The 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 BC

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

—Erasmus, 1518

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

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

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

—E.M. Forster, 1951