You don't need fancy highbrow traditions or money to really learn. You just need people with the desire to better themselves.

Adam Cooper and Bill Collage¹, Accepted, 2006

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely² uneducated.

Alec Bourne

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate³ between what you do know and what you don't.

Anatole France (1844 - 1924)

A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion⁴ of folly⁵ and of vice⁶. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge⁷ into error, to escape from the languor⁸ of idleness.

Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1823), The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764

Education is the best provision for old age.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent⁹ Philosophers

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

B. F. Skinner (1904 - 1990), New Scientist, May 21, 1964

The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people.

Claiborne Pell (1918 - )

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.

Clive James

School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come.

Dave Kellett, Sheldon, 10-09-11

The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed¹⁰ in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

Diogenes Laertius

Education begins a gentleman, conversation completes him.

Dr. Thomas Fuller (1654 - 1734), Gnomologia, 1732

I didn't go to college at all, any college, and I'm not saying you wasted your time or money, but look at me, I'm a huge celebrity¹¹.

Ellen DeGeneres, Tulane Commencement Speech, 2009

Only the educated are free.

Epictetus (55 AD - 135 AD), Discourses¹²

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962), English Social History (1942)

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

Gail Godwin

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition¹³, and art into pedantry¹⁴. Hence University education.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe¹⁵.

H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946), Outline of History (1920)

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

Education has for its object the formation of character.

Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently¹⁶ maintained.

James A. Garfield (1831 - 1881), July 12, 1880

Bachelor's degrees make pretty good placemats if you get 'em laminated.

Jeph Jacques, Questionable¹⁷ Content, 01-04-07

That's what college is for - getting as many bad decisions as possible out of the way before you're forced into the real world. I keep a checklist of 'em on the wall in my room.

Jeph Jacques, Questionable Content, 01-04-07

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty¹⁸ loses interest in students.

John Ciardi (1916 - 1986)

It has been my experience that maximizing income is a helluva lot less important than maximizing passion and fulfillment in your both professionally and personally.

John Green, Vlogbrothers, Is College Worth It?, 08-21-12

When I was in college, I remember fearing that the dreary¹⁹ grind of adulthood²⁰ would feature infinitely²¹ more existential dread²² than frat parties had, but the opposite has been true for me. I'm much less likely to feel that gnawing²³ fear of aimlessness and nihilism than I used to be and that's partly because education gave me job opportunities, but it's mostly because education gave me perspective and context.

John Green, Vlogbrothers, Is College Worth It?, 08-21-12