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

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

The 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.

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.

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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. 

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

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

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

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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