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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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?