Archive

Quotes

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

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

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

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

—W.H. Auden, 1947

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878

Repetition is the mother of education.

—Jean Paul, 1807

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

—Camille Paglia, 1992

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670

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

—Joseph Stalin, 1934

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

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

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

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

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981