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

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

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. 

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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