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Quotes

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. 

—John Updike, 1963

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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

—E.M. Forster, 1951

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

—Francis Picabia, 1949

Repetition is the mother of education.

—Jean Paul, 1807

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

—Joseph Stalin, 1934

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.

—Frederick Douglass, 1852

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

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

—Karl Kraus, 1909

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.

—William Hazlitt, 1821

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

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

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981