11 Winston Churchill Quotes on Education

Winston Churchill quotes on education

4. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

7. Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind. It cuts against the grain. A boy would like to follow his father in pursuit of food or prey. He would like to be doing serviceable things so far as his utmost strength allowed. He would like to be earning wages however small to help to keep up the home. He would like to have some leisure of his own to use or misuse as he pleased. He would ask little more than the right to work or starve. And then perhaps in the evenings a real love of learning would come to those who are worthy - and why try to stuff in those who are not? - and knowledge and thought would open the 'magic casements' of the mind.

8. 'In retrospect these years form not only the least agreeable, but the only barren and unhappy period of my life. I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I have been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a sombre grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, of toil uncheered by fruitation; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony. . . This train of thought must not lead me to exaggerate the character of my school days. . . Harrow was a very good school. . . .Most of the boys were very happy. . . I can only record the fact that, no doubt through my own shortcomings, I was an exception. . . I was on the whole considerably discouraged. . . .All my contemporaries and even younger boys seemed in every way better adapted to the conditions of our little world. They were far better both at the games and at the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.'

25. It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

28. I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man's Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.

30. I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk - and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.

63. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

126. Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never been invested.

155. Personally I am of the opinion that four assessments in three days is excessive, especially in an assessment-free week.

156. Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

209. Young man (after seeing Churchill leave the bathroom without washing his hands): At Eton they taught us to wash our hands after using the toilet. Churchill: At Harrow they taught us not to piss on our hands.