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

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.

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

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

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

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? 

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

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.