Archive

Quotes

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

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

—Ezra Pound, 1934

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

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

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

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

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

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

—Leonard Cohen, 1970

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

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

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

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.

—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

—Camille Paglia, 1992

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? 

—François Rabelais, 1533

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

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

—George Santayana, 1905