I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.

I liked my school but rather from social reasons because of my friends and the time spending together. But I was a type of child who rather preferred self-education, so I had many hobbies, many fascinating subjects like astronomy for instance. So, I really spent a lot of time studying for my pleasure.

A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.

From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

I quit high school really young, and I always loved information. I'm a self-taught kind of chick. I don't have any tactics on studying, memorizing things. It's selective memory. If I feel like it's going to be a prominent factor in the future, then I will remember that.

For these reasons, as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world. I spent the remainder of my youth in traveling, in visiting courts and armies, in holding intercourse with men of different dispositions and ranks, in collecting varied experience, in proving myself in the different situations into which fortune threw me,

The school of life was my education — the only one I could have. I learnt on the move’

I’m not one to insist that a man can’t possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I’ve tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading,

I hated school, and dropped out of college. I got picked on a lot in school, and had a lot of trouble making friends.

I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own beds, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student, I was a brat — if I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself — but this hammering kids to fit into this system is horrific. It leads to a lot of kids being either medicalized or criminalized, and I think the message I would have to kids is just like, survive it. And then, once you're out of childhood, I mean, you're just so much freer.

Right now, if you're coming out of school—is the generalization of the age of people who happen to be coming out of school, usually—it's a very valuable time where you're kind of in your prime in terms of learning new stuff and adapting and having energy and inspiration and all this. Or at the last, you'll probably match any later time in your life, whether those impulses decline or not—very good time right now. And sort of one of the worst things you can do is go work at some company that's kinda big and bureaucratic and slow, at that age, because you're still learning and you wanna run the engine fast, you wanna learn things quickly because learning is like compound interest and the more you learn, the more you'll learn from your later experience because you can handle it better or whatever.

INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION. This is a handicap that may be overcome with comparative ease. Experience has proven that the best-educated people are often those who are known as ‘self-made’ or self-educated. It takes more than a university degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated has learned to get whatever they want in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists not so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and persistently applied. People are paid not merely for what they know, but more particularly for what they do with what they know.

He who leaves school, knowing little, but with a longing for knowledge, will go farther than one who quits, knowing many things, but not caring to learn more.