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.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

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. 

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

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

The 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.

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

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

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

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.