Education

Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or skills and character traits.

• Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

• Education is the cheap defence of nations.
  • Attributed to Edmund Burke. Charles Noël Douglas, comp., Forty Thousand Quotations (1921), p. 573. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, speech, House of Commons (June 15, 1874). Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 3d series, vol. 219, col. 1618 (1874).

• An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get.
  • Attributed to William Feather, reported in August Kerber, Quotable Quotes on Education, p. 17 (1968). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People's State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the destinies of the world.
  • Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy, p. 357 (1939).

• The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.
  • Attributed to Sam Houston by the University of Texas. This quotation appears on the verso of the title-page of all University of Texas publications. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
  • Thomas Jefferson, letter to P. S. du Pont de Nemours (April 24, 1816); reported in Henry Augustine Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, And Other Writings, Official and Private, Volume 5 (1854), p. 592. This sentence is one of many quotations inscribed on Cox Corridor II, a first floor House corridor, U.S. Capitol.

• 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, letter to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 10 (1899), p. 161.

• If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
  • Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 10 (1899), p. 4.

• I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil—or a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammer—whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.
  • John F. Kennedy, commencement address, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, June 8, 1958. Transcript, p. 2. The Home Book of Quotations, ed. Burton Stevenson, 9th ed., p. 84, no. 8 (1964) gives the quotation from Goethe as follows: "Thou must (in commanding and winning, or serving and losing, suffering or triumphing) be either anvil or hammer," citing his play, Der Gross-Cophta, act II, though it has not been found there.

• If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If for ten years, plant a tree. If for a hundred years, teach the people. When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest. When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.
  • Kuan Chung, Kuan-tzu (Book of Master Kuan). Kuan tzu chi p'ing, ed. Ling Juheng, vol. 1, p. 12 (1970). Title romanized.

• Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
  • James Madison, letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822. The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 9, p. 105 (1910). These words are inscribed in the Madison Memorial Hall, Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building.

• What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?
  • James Madison, letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822. The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 9, p. 108 (1910). These words are inscribed to the right of the main entrance of the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building.

• Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men,—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
  • Horace Mann, twelfth annual report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, 1848. Life and Works of Horace Mann, ed. Mrs. Mary Mann, vol. 3, p. 669 (1868).

• To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
  • Attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. August Kerber, Quotable Quotes of Education, p. 138 (1968). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature—this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.
  • Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, part 2, chapter 17, p. 180 (1851).

• These ceremonies and the National Statuary Hall will teach the youth of the land in succeeding generations as they come and go that the chief end of human effort in a sublunary view should be usefulness to mankind, and that all true fame which should be perpetuated by public pictures, statues, and monuments, is to be acquired only by noble deeds and high achievements and the establishment of a character founded upon the principles of truth, uprightness, and inflexible integrity.
  • Alexander H. Stephens, remarks in the House, February 15, 1881, upon Vermont's presentation of a statue of Jacob Collamer to Statuary Hall. Congressional Record, vol. 11, p. 1611.

• "Via ovicipitum dura est," or, for the benefit of the engineers among you: "The way of the egghead is hard."
  • Adlai Stevenson, lecture at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 17, 1954. Stevenson, Call to Greatness, p. xi (1954).

• In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.
  • Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America, p. 211 (1918).

• In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.
  • Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education—a Plea for Reform," The Organisation of Thought, chapter 1, p. 28 (1917, reprinted 1974).

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), pp. 216–18.

• Brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel.
  • Acts, XXII. 3.

• Culture is "To know the best that has been said and thought in the world."
  • Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (1873), preface.

• Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
  • Francis Bacon, Essays, Of Studies.

• Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearsay of little children tends towards the formation of character.
  • Hosea Ballou, MS, Sermons.

• But to go to school in a summer morn,
  Oh, it drives all joy away!
  Under a cruel eye outworn,
  The little ones spend the day—
  In sighing and dismay.
  • William Blake, The Schoolboy, Stanza 2.

• Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
  • Attributed to Lord Brougham.

• Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage,—a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier, in full military array.
  • Lord Brougham, Speech. Jan. 29, 1828. Phrase "Look out, gentlemen, the schoolmaster is abroad" first used by Brougham, in 1825, at London Mechanics' Institution, referring to the secretary, John Reynolds, a schoolmaster.

• Every schoolboy hath that famous testament of Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus at his fingers' ends.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section I. Mem. I. 1.

• "Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied, "and the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."
  • Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Chapter X.

• No con quien naces, sino con quien paces.
  • Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, II. 10.

• To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Heretics.

• Quod enim munus reipublicæ afferre majus, meliusve possumus, quam si docemus atque erudimus juventutem?
  • What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?
  • Cicero, De Divinatione, II. 2.

• How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
  Excels a dunce that has been kept at home.
  • William Cowper, Progress of Error, line 410.

• The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
  • Diogenes of Sinope (according to Stobæus).

• The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.
  • Isaac D'Israeli, Literary Character, Chapter VI.

• By education most have been misled.
  • John Dryden, The Hind and Panther, Part III, line 389.

• My definition of a University is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student on the other.
  • Tradition well established that James A. Garfield used the phrase at a New York Alumni Dinner in 1872. No such words are found, however. A letter of his, Jan., 1872, contains the same line of thought.

• Impartially their talents scan,
  Just education forms the man.
  • John Gay, The Owl, Swan, Cock, Spider, Ass, and the Farmer. To a Mother, line 9.

• Of course everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), line 1.

• The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us.
  • Mrs. Jameson, Education, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles.

• Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.
  • Samuel Johnson, reported in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1772).

• Finally, education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
  • Horace Mann, Lectures and Reports on Education, Lecture 1.

• Enflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.
  • John Milton, Tract on Education.

• Der preussiche Schulmeister hat die Schlacht bei Sadowa gewonnen.
  • The Prussian schoolmaster won the battle of Sadowa.
  • Von Moltke, in the Reichstag (Feb. 16, 1874).

• Tempore ruricolæ patiens fit taurus aratri.
  • In time the bull is brought to wear the yoke.
  • Ovid, Tristia, 4. 6. 1. Translation by Thomas Watson. Hecatompathia. No. 47.

• The victory of the Prussians over the Austrians was a victory of the Prussian over the Austrian schoolmaster.
  • Privy Councillor Peschel, in Ausland, No. 19. July 17, 1866.

• Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.
  • Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Idols.

• Lambendo paulatim figurant.
  • Licking a cub into shape (free rendering).
  • Pliny the Elder, Natural History, VIII. 36.

• So watchful Bruin forms with plastic care,
  Each growing lump and brings it to a bear.
  • Alexander Pope, Dunciad, I. 101.

• Then take him to develop, if you can
  And hew the block off, and get out the man.
  • Alexander Pope, Dunciad, IV. 269. A notion of Aristotle's that there was originally in every block of marble, a statue, which would appear on the removal of the superfluous parts.

• 'Tis education forms the common mind;
  Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.
  • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle I, line 149.

• Twelve years ago I made a mock
  Of filthy trades and traffics;
  I considered what they meant by stock;
  I wrote delightful sapphics;
  I knew the streets of Rome and Troy,
  I supped with Fates and Fairies—
  Twelve years ago I was a boy,
  A happy boy at Drury's.
  • W. M. Praed, School and Schoolfellows.

• He can write and read and cast accompt.
  O monstrous!
  We took him setting of boys' copies.
  Here's a villain!
  • William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II (c. 1590-91), Act IV, scene 2, line 92.

• In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.
  • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act I, scene 1. Quoted from Kyd—Spanish Tragedy, Act II. Found in Dodsley's collection.

• God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature.
  • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act III, scene 3, line 13.

• Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.
  • Anne Louise Germaine de Staël, Corinne (1807), Book IX, Chapter I.

• Oh how our neighbour lifts his nose,
  To tell what every schoolboy knows.
  • Jonathan Swift, Century Life.

• Every school-boy knows it.
  • Jeremy Taylor, On the Real Presence, Section V, 1. Phrase attributed to Macaulay from his frequent use of it.

• Of an old tale which every schoolboy knows.
  • William Whitehead, The Roman Father, Prologue.

• Still sits the school-house by the road,
  A ragged beggar sunning;
  Around it still the sumachs grow
  And blackberry vines are running.
  • John Greenleaf Whittier, In School Days.

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