Overeducation Quotes

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

The number of people my age, younger now, a whole generation younger, who are fiercely bright, over-educated, under-employed and who are politicised and purposeless really upsets me. It's soul-destroying.

This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.

The more education you do, the less you are capable of doing.

The only way to atone for being occasionally overdressed is to be massively overeducated.

A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.

Don't trust anyone who has been in school for the past 24 consecutive years.

I know lots of people who are educated far beyond their intelligence.

My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.

I think any time you have too much education in one certain field, that can sometimes play against you.

Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

Too many people go to university.

I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.

They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.

There is such a thing as too much education for working people .... I have seen cases where young people were spoiled for labor by being educated to a little too much refinement.

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck.

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.

Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.