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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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