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

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. 

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

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

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

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

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

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? 

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

Repetition is the mother of education.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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