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

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

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.

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

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

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. 

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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