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.

Repetition is the mother of education.

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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. 

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

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper?