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

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.

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.

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

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

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

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

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.

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? 

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

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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