"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
— Robert Frost

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
— Nelson Mandela

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts."
— C.S. Lewis

"In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra. "
— Fran Lebowitz

"Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody. "
— Jane Austen

"Try not to have a good time...this is supposed to be educational."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.' "
— Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)

"The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead."
— Aristotle

"Learning is a weightless treasure you can always carry easily."
— Chinese proverb

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
— Plutarch

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.
"
— Heath L. Buckmaster (Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale)

"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned."
— Mark Twain

"Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"By seeking and blundering we learn."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Knowledge will bring you the opportunity to make a difference."
— Claire Fagin

"I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building."
— Charles M. Schulz

"A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?"
— George Washington

"Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states "accountable" for their education performance...In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats."
— Ron Paul

"The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know."
— Michel Legrand

"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."
— Peter S. Jennison

"I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other."
— Mark Twain

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of Constitutional power."
— Thomas Jefferson

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. "
— Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man)

"The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first."
— Wendell Berry

"Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books."
— John Lubbock

"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune."
— Jim Rohn

"It does not make much difference what a person studies -- all knowledge is related, and the man who studies anything, if he keeps at it, will become learned."
— Hypatia

""Education is your passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today." "
— El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

"Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word "freedom" should ever be more than an empty political slogan."
— Wilhelm Reich

"Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other."
— Neil Postman (The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School)

"Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire."
— Slavoj Žižek

"Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it."
— David Orr

"If anyone says that the best life of all is to sail the sea, and then adds that I must not sail upon a sea where shipwrecks are a common occurrence and there are often sudden storms that sweep the helmsman in an adverse direction, I conclude that this man, although he lauds navigation, really forbids me to launch my ship."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

"Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning."
— Christine de Pizan

"The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her
culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died."
— Plato (The Republic of Plato)

"Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite."
— May Sarton

"The aim of all Christian education, moreover, is to train the believer in an adult faith that can make him a "new creation", capable of bearing witness in his surroundings to the Christian hope that inspires him."
— Pope Benedict XVI (The Sacrament of Charity: Sacramentum Caritatis)

""The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.""
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"Since a time has come, Mademoiselle, when the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to the sciences and other disciplines, it seems to me that those of us who can should use this long-craved freedom to study and to let men see how greatly they wronged us when depriving us of its honor and advantages. And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her thoughts, let her do so and not despise the honor, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces, and rings. For these may be considered ours only by use, whereas the honor of being educated is ours entirely. "
— Louise Labé

"If the ass of Jesus be taken to Mekkah
He will on his return still be an ass. "
— Sa'di (The Gulistan of Sa'di)

"Philosophy is the toil which can never tire persons engaged in it. All ways are strewn with roses, and the farther you go, the more enchanting objects appear before you and invite you on."
— Mary Wortley Montagu