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

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

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

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.

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

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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

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.

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. 

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.