I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.