“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.”

“I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.”

Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) American actress

“"What happened?" Arthur asked. He caught a glimpse of something below, but couldn't quite make out what it was. "The Nithling-"
"Missed me," called out Suzy. "Close-run thing. Bit off my right clog. I was kicking it in the teeth, so I s'pose that's fair."”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

“Educators ought to know better than their pupils what an education is. If the educators do not, they have wasted their lives. The art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them, but do not. The task of educators is to discover what an education is and then to invent the methods of interesting their students in it.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

“Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such educational films as Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly and Here Comes the Metric System!. Today I will be your narrator in this sex-ed film called Fuzzy Bunny's Guide to You-Know-What.”

Phil Hartman (1948–1998) Canadian American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and graphic artist

“Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.”

Noam Chomsky book Class Warfare

“Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

“The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet