Academia Quotes

“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, Moving Pictures

“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

“What I learned on my own I still remember”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“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

“The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.”
― Daniel Dennett

“What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.”
― Terry Eagleton

“I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.”
― Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

“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, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

“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, The Death of the Liberal Class

“The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.”
― David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise

“It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“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, Misalliance

“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

“Too much elite education renders a person unpractical. And tell you what? The highly educated people are further away from reality than the less educated ones. I would rather rely on the opinion of a less educated poor person who constantly deals with people, than an overly educated idiot who views this world only through an academic lens while sitting alone on his comfy couch.”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.”
― Terry Eagleton

“Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged.”
― Tony Attwood, The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome

“Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most leftwing segment.
28. (fr) The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“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, Straight Man

“He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed animals -- weary of their cages, which were never large enough to begin with -- and they responded sluggishly to the whip. The trapeze artists fell with monotonous regularity into poorly strung nets. The clowns looked hungry. The tent leaked. The crowd was inattentive, shouting incoherently at inappropriate moments. And when the show was over, no one cheered.”
― Susan Hubbard

“As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.”
― David Lodge

“All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession. A romance

“You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."

But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end.”
― Stephen King

“I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“Globalization is not just about changing relations between the ‘inside’ of the nation-state and the ‘outside’ of the international system. It cuts across received categories, creating myriad multilayered intersections, overlapping playing fields, and actors skilled at working across these boundaries. People are at once rooted and rootless, local producers and global consumers, threatened in their identities yet continually remaking those identities.”
― Philip G. Cerny