Academia Quotes

“I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”
― James Baldwin

“Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”
― Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

“The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“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

“I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life— not the whole thing, God no— simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order— simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the words themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum— what a marvelous word: practicum! You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voilà — looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one’s deepest understanding of giant concepts.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“And Unseen University took tradition very seriously, at least when it remembered to.”
― Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

“The epitome of white privilege is the luxury of believing that "real communism has never been tried.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial—particularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society—and does his best to avoid it.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Sanshirō

“I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me become a Communist, but what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, was the feeling (real or apparent) of standing near the wheel of history. For in those days we actually did decide the fate of men and events, especially at the universities; in those early years there were very few Communists on the faculty, and the Communists in the student body ran the universities almost single-handed, making decisions on academic staffing, teaching reform, and the curriculum. The intoxication we experienced is commonly known as the intoxication of power, but (with a bit of good will) I could choose less severe words: we were bewitched by history; we were drunk with the thought of jumping on its back and feeling it beneath us; admittedly, in most cases the result was an ugly lust for power, but (as all human affairs are ambiguous) there was still (and especially, perhaps, in us, the young), an altogether idealistic illusion that we were inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history, nor under the heel of history, but would create and direct it.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“The first finding that jumped out at us was that it is possible to learn too much ! In the tournament, investing lots of time in learning was not at all effective. In fact, we found a strong negative correlation between the proportion of a strategy's moves that were INNOVATE or OBSERVE, as opposed to EXPLOIT, and how well the strategy performed. Successful strategies spent only a small fraction of their time (5-10%) learning, and the bulk of their time caching in on what they had learned, through playing EXPLOIT. Only through playing EXPLOIT can a strategy directly accrue fitness. Hencem every time a strategy chooses to learn new behavior, be it through playing INNOVATE or OBSERVE, there is a cost corresponding to the payoff that would have been received had EXPLOIT been played instead. This implied that the way to get on in life was to do a very quick bit of learning and then EXPLOIT, EXPLOIT, EXPLOIT until you die. That is a sobering lesson for someone like myself who has spent his whole life in school or university.”
― Kevin N Laland, Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind

“An entrepreneur is a broker between ideas and resources. This is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academia. Faculty members write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.”
― Neel Burton

“In academia, it seems that when we have nothing much to say we attempt to distract attention from that sad fact by saying it as pretentiously and at as much length as possible.”
― David Tourish

“It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.”
― Amanda Craig, Love in Idleness

“Word spread quickly: The visitor wished to address the scholars.
'What can he want?' they wondered, streaming into the Royal Theater. Attendance was voluntary, and unanimous. If the sight of the warriors wasn't enough to stoke their curiosity, there was rumor of a 'rare opportunity'.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“...there was an impatience in her tone, almost an accusation, as she added that academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“For too long the ideal role of the individual in our society—the role the talented young have aspired to almost by convention—has been that of the specialist. It has surely become as plain as it needs to be that what we need most now are not the specialists with their narrowed vision and short-range justifications, but men of sympathy and imagination and free intelligence who can recognize and hold themselves answerable to the complex responsibilities of a man's life in the world.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

“Now, in the academy, you cannot just say anything about male theory. You have to proceed with an immanent critique, that is to say, you have to expertly play the parts against the whole. You show, for example, how certain assumptions in the work actually defeat its stated purpose of human liberation, but once remedied, i.e. salvaged, the theory will work for women. An immanent critique can stay within the masculinist academic circle. In this position women become the technicians of male theory who have to reprogram the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war machine, killing us softly. This is a very involving task and after years of playing this part it is understandable that there may be little desire to admit that the effort was virtually futile. An investment has been made, and the conformity is not wholly outer. What attitudes and feelings does this sexist context produce towards oppositional women who refuse this male material? Does a male-circled woman have the power and security to be generous? Having compromised her freedom, will she be less willing to compromise ours? Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this arrangement, besides the ways it sets women against one another, is the fact that although the male academy values owning our freedom, it does not have to pay a lot for it. Masculine culture already controls gross amounts of female lives. Still, it seems to want more, but always at the same low price. The exploited are very affordable.”
― Somer Brodribb

“Only in the detached from reality world of goofy Hollywood and modern academia could a mass murderer like Che Guevara be turned into something of a cult celebrity.”
― Paul Kengor, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism

“After decades of talented race leaders, many of whom fell upon honourable swords, what we are left with now is educated liberals with dusky skin, warped notions, and limited vision”
― A. H. Septimius

“The intellectual summits of my life had been completing my dissertation and publishing my book, and that was already more than ten years ago. Intellectual summits? Summits, full stop. In those days, at least, I’d felt justified. Since then I hadn’t produced anything except a few short articles for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, plus a couple for The Literary Review, when some new book touched on my field of expertise. My articles were clear, incisive and brilliant. They were generally well received, especially since I never missed a deadline. But was that enough to justify a life?”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“Originated by the green leading-edge in academia, this aperspectival madness of “no truth” leapt out of the universities, and morphed into an enormous variety of different forms—from direct “no-truth” claims, to rabid egalitarianism, to excessive censoring of free speech and unhampered knowledge acquisition, to extreme political correctness (that forced the best comedians to refuse to perform at colleges any more, since the audiences “lacked all sense of humor”: you’re allowed to laugh at nothing in a “no value is better” world—even though that value itself is held to be better), to far-left political agendas that in effect “equalized poverty,” to egalitarian “no judgment” attitudes that refused to see any “higher” or “better” views at all (even though its own view was judged “higher” and “better” than any other), to modes of entertainment that everywhere eulogized egalitarian atland, to a denial of all growth hierarchies by confusing them with dominator hierarchies (which effectively crushed all routes to actual growth in any systems anywhere), to the media’s sense of egalitarian “fairness” that ended up trying to give equal time to every possible, no matter how factually idiotic, alternative viewpoint (such as Holocaust deniers), to echo chambered social media where “pleasant lies” and “reassuring falsehoods” were the standard currency.”
― Ken Wilber

“I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers

“The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“In some quarters, and particularly among those who comment on these matters in in political circles or in the media or the blogosphere or other forms of public discussion, there is, without question, a strain of hostility and resentment likely to be encountered by anyone who attempts to characterize and emphasize the value of the intellectual life carried on in universities. Clearly, a wider anti-intellectualism feeds into this, something well charted in the US from at least Richard Hofstadter onwards and brilliantly diagnosed by Thorstein Veblen and others before that.

The narrower version of this response finds it pretty outrageous for academics to criticize or complain about anything to do with universities and their support and regulation by their host society. Along with more understandable and even perhaps justifiable sources of these reactions, we do have to recognize – and here is where I know I am particularly laying myself open to misunderstanding – the force of which Nietzche termed resentiment. There is a bitterness in these reactions, a combination of anger and sneering, together with a levelling intent, that far exceeds what might seem called for by any actual disagreement about the subject matter. And if I may be allowed to risk a little sally of speculative phenomenology, I think this reaction, for all its hostility and dismissiveness, encodes a twisted acknowledgement that there is something desirable, even enviable, about the role of the scholar or the scientist. Part of the reaction, of course, involves a resentment of the supposed security of tenure in a world with very little security of employment; some of it is a sense of how much autonomy, comparatively speaking, academics have in their working lives, how much flexibility in choosing their working hours and so on, in a world where, again, most people enjoy all too little autonomy. But some of it also may be a kind of grudging acknowledgement that the matters that scholars and scientists work on are in themselves more interesting, rewarding and perhaps humanly valuable than the matter most people have to devote their energies too in their working lives. Academics are the object of, simultaneously, envy and resentment because their roles seem to allow them to deal with intrinsically rewarding matters while being financially supported by the labour of others who are not privileged to work on such matters.”
― Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities

“It takes a special energy, over and above one's creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects must be, for the new direction may not turn out to be productive at all.”
― Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

“Who needs a love life when you've got the Life of the Mind?”
― Rebecca Schuman, Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For

“I had found that universities were no different from any other large organisation; the same timid conformity, the same stifling bureaucracy, was equally present in those supposed temples of creative thought and free expression as in the most faceless corporation.”
― Dylan Evans, The Utopia Experiment