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

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

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

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

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

Repetition is the mother of education.

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

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. 

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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