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

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

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.

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

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.

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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