Top 100 Quotes About Oxford
#1. My dad, in particular, was adamant that I should finish my education. He encouraged me to go to Oxford, for instance, and I rather doubt I'd have gone if he hadn't. I would have gone straight back to L.A. and tried to start my career.
Alice Eve
#2. Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.
Philip Zaleski
#3. Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.
Nancy Pearcey
#4. All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
Jonathan Kozol
#5. Ludicrous concepts ... like the whole idea of a war on terrorism. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?
Terry Jones
#6. I had gone to Oxford to read music. I had done music all my life, but when I got to college I didn't want to do it anymore.
Sophie Kinsella
#7. My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.
Arabella Weir
#8. The slaughter of Oxford's dogs and cats had been well intentioned, but the result had been an explosion in the town's population of rats, with few surviving predators to keep them down,
Ann Swinfen
#9. After qualifying for a B.Sc. in pharmacology, I spent a few months in Sheffield University as a research worker in the pharmacology department but then went back to Oxford to the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research in order to study for a D. Phil. with Dr. Geoffrey Dawes.
John Vane
#10. One of the most celebrated victims of this theocratic policy was Shelley (1792-1811) who was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism.
Christopher Hitchens
#11. There was still food rationing in England and life was difficult all through my 2 year stay in Oxford.
Sydney Brenner
#12. I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
Mark Haddon
#13. The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it's largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.
Mark Forsyth
#14. Wherever you turn your eye - except in science - an Oxford man is at the top of the tree.
Cecil Rhodes
#15. To call a man a characteristically Oxford man is, in my opinion, to give him the highest compliment that could be paid to any human being.
William E. Gladstone
#16. The gadget had come with The New Oxford American Dictionary preloaded. You only had to begin typing your word and the Kindle found it for you. It was, he thought, TiVo for bookworms.
Stephen King
#17. Fascinating," I said, turning toward Ian. "You never told me Simon went to Oxford."
"Simon went to Oxford, Sophie.
Fisher Amelie
#18. I did really well at school, and I would have loved to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I would have read English, and I'm really interested in politics.
Emma Rigby
#19. Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.
Jeanette Winterson
#20. My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.
Chris Abani
#21. I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.
V.S. Naipaul
#22. On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' ... Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
William Safire
#23. I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn't know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That's how naive I was - so much not a cosmopolitan girl.
Jeanette Winterson
#24. Writing is new, relatively speaking. Story telling is ancient. Tell your story first putting aside all other worries. Leave fretting over homonyms, semicolons, and Oxford commas to editors and friends you can be bribe with baking.
Ada Maria Soto
#25. I hated improvisation because in my early days as an actor, improvisation meant somebody had just come down from Oxford and they were doing a play above a pub in Kentish Town, and the biggest ego would win.
Peter Capaldi
#26. I knew I should believe him, as he taught at Oxford, but his answers did not feel complete. It was like having a meal and not getting quite enough to eat.
Tracy Chevalier
#27. At Oxford he learned that the importance of human beings has been vastly over rated by specialists.
E. M. Forster
#28. On my mother's side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father's, from tenant farmers near Oxford.
John Sulston
#29. My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn't cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford.
Nick Denton
#30. The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
Evelyn Waugh
#31. This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.
John Aubrey
#32. There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean.
Hilaire Belloc
#33. The Oxford manner is, alas, indefinable; I was going to say indefensible.
Robert Baldwin Ross
#34. From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
Margaret Halsey
#35. Because I'd done 30 plays or so at Oxford, I thought that I was an actress anyway because that's what I was doing!
Katherine Parkinson
#36. I went to prep school, Eton and Oxford. When people hear that, they think they know you, and you think: 'No, you don't.'
Harry Lloyd
#37. Who is more in touch with the problems of this country? One of those guys who goes off to Oxford or to University of Yale, or someone who has lived in buses, in the Metro, in the street?
Gloria Trevi
#38. I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn't know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn't do that in Pakistan - you'd be thrown in prison.
Benazir Bhutto
#39. Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley's favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers, and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun.
John Le Carre
#40. When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months.
Tariq Ali
#41. The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.
Robert Darnton
#42. A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
Christina Stead
#43. There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.
Ella Dominguez
#44. People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.
Samantha Shannon
#46. When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.
Charles Finch
#47. Gert was always of the mind that she wouldn't go to another church except the Catholic Church. So when I would date her in New York City, and later when we went to Oxford before we got married, we always went to the Catholic church.
Wesley Clark
#48. Our daughter's name Arwynn comes from Arwen in 'Lord of the Rings' because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.
Adrian McKinty
#49. Just remember, Braithwaite. While you were learning to be a fool at Oxford I was learning to kill men. And I learned well.
Bernard Cornwell
#50. Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the [Oxford] common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizons of the place.
Benjamin Jowett
#51. I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini-wax. See what Hollywood does to you?
Kate Beckinsale
#52. Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving.
Deborah Moggach
#53. The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#54. Oxford also taught me something else - it taught me scepticism.
Frank Scott
#55. I made it to Oxford, but it is not that I am particularly clever, much more that I am a worker bee.
Emilia Fox
#56. Oxford shirts. Definitely more oxford shirts.
Mao Zedong
#57. It is futile to advance the argument that glasses are unromantic. They are not. I know, because I wear them myself, and I am a singularly romantic figure, whether in my rimless, my Oxford gold-bordered, or the plain gent's spectacles which I wear in the privacy of my study.
P.G. Wodehouse
#58. I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse.
Walter Kirn
#59. Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That's the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description.
P.G. Wodehouse
#60. Books provide a handy shorthand when Rory's mostly MIA father, Christopher, is first introduced to viewers. Christopher's offer to buy Rory the Compact Oxford English Dictionary she covets is sincere; his lack of ability to follow through on his good intentions is Christopher in a nutshell.
Jennifer Crusie
#62. An Oxford degree or owning a successful business or a perfect looking body does NOT guarantee inner-happiness, peace of mind, self-love, and a loving relationship.
Maddy Malhotra
#63. It was in the beginning of the month of November, 17
, when a young English gentleman, who had just left the university of Oxford, made use of the liberty afforded him, to visit some parts of the north of England; and curiosity extended his tour into the adjacent frontier of the sister country.
Walter Scott
#64. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.
Lynne Truss
#65. Oxford University offered prizes for the works that attacked Vedic knowledge.
Devamrita Swami
#66. My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.
Simon Callow
#67. I went to Oxford University - but I've never let that hold me back.
Margaret Thatcher
#68. I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do.
Jeanette Winterson
#69. It is a strange world, Oxford - quite claustrophobic. I was often glad I was only there for eight weeks at a time.
Samantha Shannon
#70. I want to prove that you don't have to come from Oxford University or Rada - and you don't have to have parents that support you - to succeed.
Samantha Morton
#71. While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.
Anne Fortier
#72. There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."
Gordon Allport
#73. The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse, For Tories own no argument but force; With equal care, to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs allow no force but argument.
William Browne
#74. I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father's income was such that I wouldn't have got a grant, and he wouldn't let me go to university, and that was the end of it.
Colin Baker
#75. Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.
Frances O'Grady
#76. A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses
A. J. Jacobs
#77. I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.
Nigel Rees
#78. He was wearing a plain white oxford unbuttoned over a T-shirt, but something about the way they fit made him look put together, like an Abercrombie model (well, like an Abercrombie model who had remembered to put on a shirt that morning).
Claire LaZebnik
#79. I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.
Vera Brittain
#80. As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
Niall Ferguson
#81. Unless one was going to become a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer or some other kind of professional person, I saw little point in wasting three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge, and I still hold this view.
Roald Dahl
#82. In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.
Neal Stephenson
#83. Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.
James Gleick
#84. Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.
John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.
John Fowles
#85. I read Zuleika Dobson with pleasure. It represents the Oxford that the two World Wars have destroyed with a charm that is not likely to be reproduced anywhere in the world for the next thousand years.
Bertrand Russell
#86. Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew.
Harry Carpenter
#87. I met my wife, Jennifer, while sitting next to her on the airplane on the way to England. I was heading to Oxford as a Marshall scholar.
Derek Kilmer
#88. Always have a pink Oxford shint ready for days when you're feeling run down.
Michael Bastian
#89. Relatively, there are many scientists who believe in God. And in Oxford, where I am the Professor, there are more professors like me, who believe in God, than you think. There are not dozens of them, but they are there, and in Cambridge too, and elsewhere. We are not in a tiny minority.
John Lennox
#90. So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee.
Thomas De Quincey
#91. Pointing to the sandstone buildings around us, some of which had stood there for several hundreds of years, she commented on how old everything in Oxford looked. Can't they afford anything new? she asked earnestly.
Zia Haider Rahman
#92. Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.
Max Beerbohm
#93. It would have been amazing to have been a student at Oxford during that golden moment in the 1910s, rubbing elbows with the likes of Aldous Huxley and T.E. Lawrence, before World War I shattered everything forever.
Kevin Kwan
#94. Ralston stiffened at the reference to the stupid wager that caused so much pain and unhappiness. He ignored Oxford's proffered hand, and instead met the baron's concerned gaze, and said, Keep the money. I have her. She's all I want.
Sarah MacLean
#95. The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
Samuel Butler
#96. At the age of 14, I moved across town to Magdalen College School, Oxford, where science played a much larger role in the curriculum.
Tim Hunt
#97. Years later I applied for Oxford University, and I suppose you could say that in this way I escaped from my parents. Being their sole child had become too complicated.
Rachel Joyce
#98. That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character - Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.
Diana Quick
#99. I am a Topshop homing pigeon! I can walk into the Oxford Circus branch and ferret out the best bits in minutes.
Ashley Madekwe
#100. I was educated at Bradfield College and Oxford, where I graduated in 1939.
Martin Ryle
