Archive

Quotes

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

—George Santayana, 1905

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

—Francis Picabia, 1949

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

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

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

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

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

—E.M. Forster, 1951

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

—Lord Byron, 1812

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

—H.G. Wells, 1920

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

—Karl Kraus, 1909

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

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC