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.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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. 

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.