A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Quotes
The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
—Laurence Sterne, 1760A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851The 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.
—John Updike, 1963Repetition is the mother of education.
—Jean Paul, 1807Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
—E.M. Forster, 1951The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.
—Heinrich Heine, 1827In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897It 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.
—Frederick Douglass, 1852My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
—Joseph Stalin, 1934The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana, 1905