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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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.

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

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

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

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

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