Archive

Quotes

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

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

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

—Erasmus, 1518

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

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

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

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.

—William Hazlitt, 1821

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

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

—Ezra Pound, 1934

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

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

—Alice James, 1889

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

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

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

—W.H. Auden, 1947

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670