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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Repetition is the mother of education.

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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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