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Quotes

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

—Ezra Pound, 1934

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

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

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

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.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

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

—Alice James, 1889

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

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

—George Santayana, 1905

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

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.

—Herodotus, c. 440 BC

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 a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

—Erasmus, 1518