Quotes About Academia

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

Terry Pratchett

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

Michael R. Underwood

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

Gregory Benford

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#10. 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

#11. Chivalry in academia is dead.

Sylvain Reynard

#12. 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

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

Santosh Kalwar

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Neel Burton

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

S.A. Tawks

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Tucker Max

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Marty Rubin

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

Lauren Willig

#34. 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

#35. [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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Philip Zaleski

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

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

Robert Reich

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

Sarah Kuhn

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

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

Barry McGee

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

Slavoj Zizek

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

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

Laurence J. Peter

#61. 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

#62. 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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Alissa Nutting

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

Peter Slezak

#66. 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

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

Paul Giamatti

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

Richard Russo

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

George Eliot

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

Maggie Stiefvater

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

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

Anton Chekhov

#79. 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

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

Sergio De La Pava

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

Henry Kissinger

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis; but in academia there is virtually nothing but noetic minds to be found, and the very idea of gnosis is alien and untranslatable, not to mention discreditable.

Kenny Smith

#85. He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.

Richard Russo

#86. Have I mentioned the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland 'firestorm' of 1991? No need. There are already there, in my narratives that fail to mention them, in my dreams that fail to represent them.

Robert Appelbaum

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

A.S. Byatt

#88. He imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile.

Lev Grossman

#89. So it has been, again and again throughout my life, as I form connections with people and then lose them to distance and time. I mourn those losses, even when I know my erstwhile friends are safe and happy among their own kin.

Marie Brennan

#90. Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.

Philip Zaleski

#91. I have been blessed to have had many excellent teachers. The further I get away from school, though, the more I realize that the greatest teachers in my life have come from outside of academia.

Brad Thor

#92. I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it.

Mira Sorvino

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

Gene Luen Yang

#94. 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

#95. My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.

Pete Seeger

#96. What I learned on my own I still remember

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#97. The path of specialization leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of understanding in terms of which man actually lives his day-to-day life.

William Barrett

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

Antony Garrett Lisi

#99. I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#100. Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, teaching, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science.

William Deresiewicz