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

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

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.

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

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

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? 

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