Eton College Quotes

Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise. - Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

Sending a teenager to jail costs more than it would to send him to Eton College,

Just before the start of Summer Half, in April 1883, a very minor event took place at Eton College, that venerable and illustrious English public school for boys. A sixteen-year-old pupil named Archer Fairfax returned form a three-month absence, caused by a fractured femur, to resume his education. Almost every word in the preceding sentence is false.

Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade, Ah, fields belov'd in vain, Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales, that from ye blow, A momentary bliss bestow, As waving fresh their gladsome wing, My weary soul they seem to soothe, And, redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring.

Sending a teenager to jail costs more than it would to send him to Eton College, the private boarding school in England that educated Princes William and Harry. It seems especially odd that the United States, a country with a proud history of limited government, is so unquestioningly generous when it comes to this particular public service, on which it blows $80 billion a year. Does it really need to lock up five times as many people per capita as Britain, six times as many as Canada, and nine times as many as Germany

Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge. "Just what I need!" I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag: Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed his students − including me − had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the "Invocation to Light" in Book 9. So I said, "Wait here," and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag: Milton assumed I'd read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I'd been reared in Judaism I hadn't. So I said, "Wait here," and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays by Shakespeare, and Boswell's Johnson, but also the Second books of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it's in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed. So what with one thing and another and an average of three "Wait here's" a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q's five books of lectures.

Eton and Oxford set a certain stamp upon a man’s mind, just as a Jesuit College does. It can hardly be said that Eton and Oxford have a conscious purpose, but they have a purpose which is none the less strong and effective for not being formulated. In almost all who have been through them they produce a worship of “good form,” which is as destructive to life and thought as the medieval Church. “Good form” is quite compatiblewith a superficial open-mindedness, a readiness to hear all sides, and a certain urbanity towards opponents. But it is not compatible with fundamental open-mindedness, or with any inward readiness to give weight to the other side. Its essence is the assumption that what is most important is a certain kind of behavior, a behavior which minimizes friction between equals and delicately impresses inferiors with a conviction of their own crudity.

I hadn’t gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I’d been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I’d figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh—truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile—who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers—but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I’d come to accept it. And I understood that it didn’t make them any better than me.

Some grammar schools were founded even earlier, in the medieval period, including Winchester College (1382) and Eton College (1440), which was granted a monopoly 10 miles around Eton ‘so it may excel all other grammar schools…and be called the lady mother and mistress of all other grammar schools’.

Reformers believed moral and political relationships were learned in play. Given street-afforded license, kids would grow up bad. “If we let the gutter set its stamp upon their early days,” Jacob Riis warned in 1904, “we shall have the gutter reproduced in our politics.” The antidote to the street was the supervised playground. Settlement houses had opened rudimentary play spaces in the 1890s. In 1898 the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL), founded by Lillian Wald and Charles B. Stover and housed in the College Settlement, opened the city’s first outdoor playground in Hudsonbank Park (at West 53rd Street), whose sand gardens, running track, and equipment were supervised by Hartley House’s headworker. Playground proponents insisted the city take over and expand these programs. An 1898 University Settlement report argued: “Waterloo was won in part on the playing fields of Eton said Wellington; good government for New York may partially be won on the playgrounds of the East Side.” In 1902 the city assumed responsibility for the nine ORL playgrounds created to date. And in 1903 Seward Park became the first municipal park in the country to be equipped as a playground.

Cameron was born in 1966 and attended Eton College and Oxford University. He became the Member of Parliament for Witney in Oxfordshire in 2001. Four years later he was elected leader of the Conservative Party, where he implemented a programme of modernisation. After the 2010 election he became prime minister of a coalition government, which turned

Cameron was born in 1966 and attended Eton College and Oxford University. He became the Member of Parliament for Witney in Oxfordshire in 2001. Four years later he was elected leader of the Conservative Party, where he implemented a programme of modernisation. After the 2010 election he became prime minister of a coalition government,

BOARDING SCHOOLS, n. Schools based on the idea that it’s good for children as young as six or seven to be institutionalized and raised by strangers. “How I hated this school...what a life of anxiety,” Churchill wrote about his experience at Eton. See ETON COLLEGE.

In 2020, Will Knowland, an English teacher at Eton College – the oldest and poshest school in the UK – attracted a great deal of media attention when he was dismissed for producing a video titled ‘The Patriarchy Paradox’ as part of a course on critical thinking intended for older students.27

Following that, the couple planned a final salute to Esmond’s Out of Bounds period. It was a raid on Eton College, with Philip Toynbee acting as gang member. Decca knew the layout because of her many family connections who were Old Etonians, and she took them to the anteroom of the chapel where they relieved the hat pegs of all the top hats they could carry away. They returned to London flushed with victory and thirty hats, ‘gallant symbols of our hatred of Eton, of our anarchy, our defiance,’ Toynbee wrote.39 Later, Toynbee lost his girlfriend over the incident for when he told her about it she turned huffy and said it was stealing. And it is difficult, with hindsight, to put any other interpretation on it. Had the trio repaired in good humour to a Thames bridge and cast the lot into the river, it might have been viewed as a prank, and a snub to a society they abhorred. But instead Esmond sold the hats to a second-hand clothes dealer and pocketed the cash. Which seems to smack as much of opportunism as any form of idealism.

Bertie was at Eton just at the time when its peculiar version of the Victorian public school system was being developed. Before his day was the old Eton of riots, multiple birchings, and savage boxing duels lasting for hours in which it was not unknown for a boy to be killed; the Eton of the picturesque but disorderly procession ‘ad Montem’ at which money was begged, and sometimes actually extorted, from passers-by, the Eton of the infamous Long Chamber where seventy scholarship boys or Collegers were locked in from dusk to dawn. Shortly before Bertie arrived, Long Chamber had been reduced in size, divided into cubicles, and supplemented by what are still called the New Buildings; during his time Montem was abolished. During and just after his time Eton became, in its essentials, what it is today.