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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.