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Quotes

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

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. 

—John Updike, 1963

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

—W.H. Auden, 1947

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

—Erasmus, 1518

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

—Francis Picabia, 1949

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

—E.M. Forster, 1951

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.

—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75

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

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

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

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923