“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.”

“The ideal of an “all-round” education is out of date; it has been destroyed by the progress of knowledge.”

“An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. ”

“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[To William Graham 3 July 1881]”

“A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.”