Quotes about colleges and universities

"To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises."

Arendt, Hannah on colleges and universities   

"Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!"

Arnold, Matthew on colleges and universities   

"The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your moldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics."

Artaud, Antonin on colleges and universities   

"I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable."

Beerbohm, Sir Max on colleges and universities   

"Remote and ineffectual don."

Belloc, Hilaire on colleges and universities   

"The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself."

Bloom, Allan on colleges and universities
3 fans of this quote   

"What poor education I have received has been gained in the University of Life."

Bottomley, Horatio on colleges and universities   

"This place is the Devil, or at least his principal residence, they call it the University, but any other appellation would have suited it much better, for study is the last pursuit of the society; the Master eats, drinks, and sleeps, the Fellows drink, dispute and pun, the employments of the undergraduates you will probably conjecture without my description."

Byron, Lord on colleges and universities   

"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students."

Ciardi, John on colleges and universities   

"'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman."

Congreve, William on colleges and universities   

"The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring."

Davies, Robertson on colleges and universities   

"Within the university... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent."

Derrida, Jacques on colleges and universities   

"A college education should equip one to entertain three things: a friend, an idea and oneself."

Ehrlich, Thomas on colleges and universities   

"One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on colleges and universities   

"Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on colleges and universities   

"The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on colleges and universities   

"Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another."

Forster, Edward M. on colleges and universities   

"Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on colleges and universities   

"I had always imagined that Clich? was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford."

Guedalla, Philip on colleges and universities   

"I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford."

Halifax, Edward F. on colleges and universities   

"If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means -- from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath."

Halsey, Margaret on colleges and universities   

"Towery city and branching between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded."

Hopkins, Gerard Manley on colleges and universities   

"The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge."

Huxley, Thomas H. on colleges and universities   

"University degrees are a bit like adultery: you may not want to get involved with that sort of thing, but you don't want to be thought incapable."

Imbert, Sir Peter on colleges and universities   

"Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed."

Ingersoll, Robert Green on colleges and universities   

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."

Keller, Helen on colleges and universities
3 fans of this quote   

"It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree."

Kennedy, John F. on colleges and universities   

"While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap."

Kroc, Ray on colleges and universities   

"They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls."

Lawrence, D. H. on colleges and universities   

"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."

Lessing, Doris on colleges and universities   

"I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum."

Maugham, W. Somerset on colleges and universities   

"Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse."

Mencken, H. L. on colleges and universities   

"I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them -- the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings."

Merton, Thomas on colleges and universities   

"American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone."

Paglia, Camille on colleges and universities   

"Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top."

Paglia, Camille on colleges and universities   

"Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both."

Plath, Sylvia on colleges and universities   

"A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education."

Roosevelt, Theodore on colleges and universities
6 fans of this quote   

"It is dangerous sending a young man who is beautiful to Oxford."

Ryder, Dudley on colleges and universities   

"Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies."

Santayana, George on colleges and universities   

"Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge."

Trevelyan, G. M. on colleges and universities