"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
"We are a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants." - Scott Adams
"Wit is educated insolence." - Aristotle
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
"In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid." - Dave Barry
"I know the American masses go to public schools and therefore are by and large ignoramuses. But I had no idea how many were abject pussies. Europe? Sure. Canada? Of Course. But Americans? When did this happen?" - Buff
"The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow." - William Blake
"If you’re going to learn from your mistakes, they really ought to hurt. Drink too much, and you’ll spend the wee hours discovering what bathroom tile feels like on your knees, and become entirely too familiar with the inside of your buddy Brien Ferguson’s toilet bowl. Come morning, you’re stuck between the competing desires to chew aspirin or take a Brill-O pad to your tongue. Lesson learned – don’t mix six White Russians with a cocktail tray full of Zombies." - Stephen Green
"We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me." - Jack Handey
"I bet a fun thing would be to go way back in time to where there was going to be an eclipse and tell the cave men, 'If I have come to destroy you, may the sun be blotted out from the sky.' Just then the eclipse would start, and they'd probably try to kill you or something, but then you could explain about the rotation of the moon and all, and everyone would get a good laugh." - Jack Handey
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebook of Lazarus Long
"You live and learn. Or you don't live long." - Robert A. Heinlein
"Common sense is in spite of, not the result of, [progressive] education." - Victor Hugo
"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications." - Fran Lebowitz
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." - John Stuart Mill, 1859
"If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools." - William Penn
"Any pair of idiots who breed and yet fail to teach their children how to read deserve kids who on Father's Day and Mother's Day can only give them the middle finger to express their affections." - Nicholas Provenzo
"There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think." - Ayn Rand
"Understanding is a kind of ecstasy." - Carl Sagan
"Ignorance is often bliss - to the ignorant. Slaves, in general, tend to cherish their chains." - L. Neil Smith
"When you teach your son, you teach your son's son." - The Talmud
"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards." - Mark Twain
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." - Mark Twain
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But, when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." - Mark Twain
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"Don't approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side." - Yiddish proverb