Academia's Quotes

#1. Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.

Debra Dean

#2. It's very important that there should be cross-fertilisation between government and academia. Both parties can benefit from having a better understanding of how the other works.

Nicholas Stern

#3. That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.

Richard Russo

#4. The tunnel under the wall of intellectual snobbery is the only way back to common sense reality, but most won't find it because it is beneath them.

D.E. Navarro

#5. It is extraordinarily difficult, even in academia, to find a job that will let you do whatever you want with your time. If you are determined to spend your time following your own interests, you pretty much have to do it on your own.

Antony Garrett Lisi

#6. In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.

Andrew Sullivan

#7. It is one of the great ironies of corporate control that the corporate state needs the abilities of intellectuals to maintain power, yet outside of this role it refuses to permit intellectuals to think or function independently.

Chris Hedges

#8. It was the opposite of Gansey's most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia.

Maggie Stiefvater

#9. In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

George Eliot

#10. Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

Richard Russo

#11. Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.

Paul Giamatti

#12. To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)

Dorothy L. Sayers

#13. No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.

Peter Slezak

#14. I don't consider myself attractive. I'm an academic, and in academia, people will write you off if you look younger.

Alissa Nutting

#15. The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#16. I liked teaching, but the bureaucracy of academia and the petty intrigue ... It wasn't a good fit. Once I admitted that myself, that I didn't like academia, I was ready to try TV.

Nic Pizzolatto

#17. With a cloak of naturalized rationalism, scholars can deflect our attention from the power effected in their theory-making.

-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 23

Randall Styers

#18. Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.

Laurence J. Peter

#19. The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women's broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.

M. E. W. Sherwood

#20. The brain scientists are the wave of the future in the financial world. If you seek to maximize understanding, whether you're in academia or in the investment community, you'd better pay serious attention to them.

Daniel Kahneman

#21. When the established members of academia start becoming vocal as to how poor your art is, then you know you're on to something.

Derek R. Audette

#22. Social power is at stake in theory-making, but the workings of this power are often unacknowledged -- and overdetermined.

-- Making Magic, p. 23

Randall Styers

#23. When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.

George Eliot

#24. We need people like you, Dobson," said Gina. "In academia, where I work. Man, do we ever need people like you. People who have been trained. To do the high-level work. Such as killing.

Lydia Millet

#25. A spectre is haunting Western academia ( ... ), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.

Slavoj Zizek

#26. Drawings, paintings, and sculptures. That's the three pillars of art academia.

Barry McGee

#27. Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

Brian Eno

#28. It's the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

Amanda Craig

#29. I think the audience should take away that it's okay to be smart, it's okay to be funny and well-learned. You can be from academia and be funny; you don't have to be an idiot.

Godfrey

#30. Most of my writing friends are working in academia. Most of my business school friends are always talking about bringing companies public, and money, and making money, and lots and lots of money. It's just a different environment.

Victoria Chang

#31. I make films, and festivals, museums, and academia are embracing the work. It will be heard. It's bound to happen because cinema is universal. You create it, some people will notice it, some people will watch it.

Lav Diaz

#32. I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.

Sandra Cisneros

#33. It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

Lauren Groff

#34. One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education, academia, the service industry, arts, publishing, theater, politics, fashion, finance, as well as movie-making.

Sarah Jessica Parker

#35. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

Harold Bloom

#36. It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Alexander Chee

#37. There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

David Graeber

#38. Today's college students demand a self-segregating "safe space". Rosa Parks spinning in her grave.

A.E. Samaan

#39. Ray Comfort's got a fabulous film. Oh boy, this is going to cause the halls of academia to have a few conversations around the cafeteria.

Janet Parshall

#40. See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#41. Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia. But I'm nowhere near Einstein's caliber.

Antony Garrett Lisi

#42. The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday's America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today.

Jim Webb

#43. In academia in general, there's this push toward using comics as an educational tool.

Gene Luen Yang

#44. All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

A.S. Byatt

#45. Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.

Lev Grossman

#46. We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.

Thomas Sowell

#47. The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small

Henry Kissinger

#48. Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others.

Sergio De La Pava

#49. Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her - the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.

Vikram Seth

#50. It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

Anton Chekhov

#51. In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.

John Shelby Spong

#52. As a civil servant in charge of the government's Strategy Unit, I brought in many people from outside government, including academia and science, to work in the unit, dissecting and solving complex problems from GM crops to alcohol, nuclear proliferation to schools reform.

Geoff Mulgan

#53. As academia became my identity, my fascination with firefighters became buried and, seemingly, died.

S.A. Tawks

#54. After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

Joshua Ferris

#55. Above the podium stood a decorated board showing the agenda for the day. The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second - the ecology crisis, the third - the air pollution crisis, the fourth - the energy crisis, the fifth - the food crisis. Then adjournment.

Stanislaw Lem

#56. What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

George Bernard Shaw

#57. What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.
"Well, Eve
it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#58. Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

Werner Herzog

#59. The creation of a triangular relationship among government, industry, and academia was, in its own way, one of the significant innovations that helped produce the technological revolution of the late twentieth century.

Walter Isaacson

#60. There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.

Christian Wiman

#61. The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.

Neel Burton

#62. A president aiming for 'Great' or 'Near Great' status must do more. He must give lots of interviews, make records accessible, and heap the flattery on academia - each of which Mr. Bush has signally failed to do.

Thomas Frank

#63. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.

Kingsley Amis

#64. Free from ivory-tower
the pencil twirls
across the footpath

Santosh Kalwar

#65. Too much time in academia can actually do you harm. There are a lot of skills that are useful in academia that aren't worth much outside of it.

Jason Fried

#66. Chivalry in academia is dead.

Sylvain Reynard

#67. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.

Werner Herzog

#68. Though I have friends aplenty in academia, I don't operate within the academic system myself.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#69. When people think about 'thinking,' they often think 'academia;' they think 'threat.' They think 'coldness.' I want to reverse all those images and say, 'No, the brain God gave you is intended to throw fuel on the fire of your affections for God. It's really good at it if you let it.'

John Piper

#70. Most faculty spend a lot of time thinking about content and what to cover, but content delivery is not the core strength of a university, just as it is not for newspapers. The core strength of a university is integration.

Jose Antonio Bowen

#71. It was only in university I was told that I was dyslexic. It kind of gave me the confidence to be able to pursue academia in the way that I always thought I could. I guess that was a bit of battle and just my own kind of negative thoughts about what I can achieve.

Erin Richards

#72. Every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture
from him, of course.

Gregory Benford

#73. I am a master of folklore - I should be able to throw folklore fireballs or something.

Michael R. Underwood

#74. Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.

Michael Crichton

#75. If the early Christian accounts of dramatic signs make these works seem foreign and foreboding to segments of modern Western academia,[85] they are nevertheless welcome in many of the dynamic churches of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which believe that they share their experiences.

Craig S. Keener

#76. And Unseen University took tradition very seriously, at least when it remembered to.

Terry Pratchett

#77. Like most people in Academia, my vision of the future is the same as the average industry person's vision of five years ago.

Philip Greenspun

#78. Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

Catharine MacKinnon

#79. the well-paid pickings for PhD Program Dropouts Who Only Have Experience Working in Academia were basically nonexistent

Sarah Kuhn

#80. In Washington, it's dog eat dog. In academia, it's exactly the opposite.

Robert Reich

#81. No party in the US can hope to rule without the support of Jewish money and Jewish power in the media and academia.

Israel Shamir

#82. Something as radical as a war can only be understood (if at all) through the collaboration of journalists, academia, artists and, of course, people.

Sasa Stanisic

#83. I had very little support from any feminist organization. But fortunately my post-marital lover, who had bailed out of academia over political in-fighting, was a one-man support team. He was the one who pushed me to write.

Betty Dodson

#84. There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#85. we didn't know what was impossible. Neither, apparently, did he: He was among the first to believe that Hollywood movie execs would care a fig about what was happening in academia.

Ed Catmull

#86. Oxford was in love with the idea of Christian perfection.

Philip Zaleski

#87. I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.

Vladimir Nabokov

#88. Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.

Gloria Steinem

#89. I worked in information technology and academia for a long time and met many people who were better with things and ideas than with people.

Graeme Simsion

#90. Ideas matter - and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.

Sam Harris

#91. [Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture.

-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 17

Randall Styers

#92. I had little contact with people outside academia and had formed my assumptions about the rest of the world primarily from watching films and televisions as a child. I recognised that the characters in 'Lost in Space' and 'Star Trek' were probably not representative of humans in general.

Graeme Simsion

#93. If I stay in academia, I might end up going someplace random.

Lauren Willig

#94. In school one learns to ask stupid questions of life.

Marty Rubin

#95. The views of intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow ... What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been described long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles.

Friedrich Hayek

#96. Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

Terry Pratchett

#97. The Time to Succeed Coalition brings together an unprecedented group of leaders from education and business, communities and academia to say that it is time to strike the shackles of an outdated school calendar from our disadvantaged schools.

Chris Gabrieli

#98. There's a formality in academia that can't be ignored, even if a man is busy with other things, like trying not to die.

Randy Pausch

#99. Unless you plan on making academia your life, all you need to know about postmodernism is that its premises are fundamentally wrong.

Tucker Max

#100. Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.

Marvin Olasky