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

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

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? 

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 whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

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

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.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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