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

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.

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

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.

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

That which is evil is soon learned.