Repetition is the mother of education.

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

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.

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

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.