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

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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

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

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.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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.