Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.
—Ezra Pound, 1934Quotes
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H.G. Wells, 1920That which is evil is soon learned.
—John Ray, 1670Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
—Joseph Stalin, 1934Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W.H. Auden, 1947Anyone 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, 1821Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851The 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 BCA school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.
—Erasmus, 1518In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897The 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, 1963