"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side.' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on.Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'"~ Adolf Hitler
No, wait. Then we'll be a nation of illiterates.
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.- Speech 11/23/1900I 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.- "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation," 1867Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.- The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of the Extraordinary Twins It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others--and less trouble.- Doctor Van Dyke speech, 1906The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.- "Taming the Bicycle," 1917All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.- Notebook 1908Everything has its limit--iron ore cannot be educated into gold.- What is Man?Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1898In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion. - "The Game" instruction sheet for Mark Twain's Memory Builder
