Education - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which have no means of communication.What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education!

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man.

- J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (play, 1904)

Education is our highest art, only allowed to our highest artists.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)

To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority. It is this point of view - academic minds clinging like oysters to disproved theories - that has blocked every advance of knowledge in history.

- Robert A. Heinlein, ''Life-Line'' (1939)

Dad says this is the best kind of a school, that a university consists of a log with a teacher on one end and a pupil on the other. But Dad is a sort of romantic.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Farmer in the Sky (1950)

Teachers always tell you what you do wrong not what you do right, this is Education.

- Pauline Ashwell, ''Unwillingly to School'' (1958)

Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld Revisited (1958)

You often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.

- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961)

Pompous, solemn, pedantic, devoid of originality and critical sense, intent on preserving tradition, blind and deaf to all innovation, they form the substratum of every academy. Endowed with a good memory, they learn an enormous amount by heart and from books. Then they themselves write other books, in which they repeat what they have read, thereby earning the respect of their fellow orangutans.

- Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes (1963), translated by Xan Fielding (1963)

There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man's opinion is as good as another's.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road (1963)

It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

Education, my friend, is not always a blessing. Like a gun, it depends on who has it.

- Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Prisoners of Power (1969), translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson (1977)

Through her efforts Teachers have become the most respected of all citizens and the schools the most powerful of all institutions.

- KateWilhelm, ''The Funeral'' (1972)

Schoolteacher - lost that job when they caught me teaching the kids the raw truth, a capital offense anywhere in the Galaxy.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

Learning is a side-effect of joy.

- Thomas M. Disch, 334 (1974)

Wasn't the whole point of college to keep as many young people as possible occupied and out of jobs?

- Thomas M. Disch, 334 (1974)

If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

- Roger Zelazny, ''Home Is the Hangman'' (1975)

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

You teach best what you most need to learn.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

How do you explain school to higher intelligence?

- Melissa Mathison, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (film, 1982)

''The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?'' ''It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,'' came a low growl from somewhere on the table, ''without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy.'' - Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

She liked teaching. But she found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones.

- Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (1987)

''It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,'' he said. ''Have you thought of going into teaching?'' - Terry Pratchett, Mort (1987)

An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown.

- Richard Bach, One (1988)

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 (1990)

''Students?'' barked the Archchancellor. ''Yes, Master. You know? They're the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we're a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats - '' - Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures (1990)

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires. Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent software and data pirates. Universities do not merely ''leak information'' but vigorously broadcast free thought.

- Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (1992)

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (1996)