Academic Quotes

“If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.”
― Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

“A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite.”
― Robert Fanney

“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

“It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.”
― Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

“Fairness isn’t about charity. It’s smart business.”
― Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction

“Fairness is a leadership superpower. ”
― Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction

“I’m the guy who knows how you can hurt so much that your insides feel like they’re cut and bleeding.”
― Stephanie Witter, Patch Up

“My priority is not about grades. I seek yearn for knowledge, skills and wisdom.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.”
― Harold Bloom, Books of the Western Canon: 797 Great Books by 204 Essential Authors

“If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.”
― Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac

“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

“All the things we experience in life can be separated into two realms, the realm of the concept and the realm of the senses.”
― Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

“Dove tu sei, quella è casa.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“In the end, ethical interpretation of the Bible means to think critically about how our practices of textual engagement might help us to become both more human and more humane. We are constantly crafting and recrafting ourselves, and the goal is to do so in such a way that we contribute, even if only incrementally, more to the good in the world than to the bad. We think of the point made by Tim Beal (2011, 184), who notes that the etymological root of the word “religion” is typically taken to be the Latin religare, from the verb ligare, meaning “to bind” or “to attach” (ergo our word “ligament”). Religion, in this line of thinking, has to do with being bound to certain doctrines, ideas, or practices. But Beal points out that there is another etymology, suggested by the ancient Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, who proposed that religion derives from the Latin relegere, itself a form of the root legere, “to read” (ergo our words “legible” and even “lectionary”). “Re-ligion” becomes then a process of “re-reading,” and the shaping of a religious life (or more broadly a moral life, or more broadly still just a life) is a continual process of engagement with tradition in the context of present realities. We spoke early on in this book about the “traditioning” process that lies behind the biblical text, the way in which earlier texts and traditions are taken up in later contexts in which they are both preserved and transformed. As a result, Scripture itself presents a rich variety of voices, and sometimes one author or text disagrees with the other. It is an ongoing conversation rather than a set of settled doctrines. And it is our privilege to be invited into that conversation, to become ourselves part of the traditioning process, seeking to bring an unfolding understanding of the good into our present reality.”
― Walter Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination

“Ogni volta che usa la parola "nostro" il mio cuore manca un battito.”
― Anna Todd, After

“Colui che ha occhi per vedere e orecchi per sentire deve convincersi che nessun mortale sa mantenere un segreto: se le sue labbra sono serrate parlerà con la punta delle dita, il suo tradirsi trasuderà da ogni poro.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Half of what students learn in school is useful only during examinations.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Before You Doubt Yourself: Pep Talks and other Crucial Discussions

“Prof. George Wiafe said, Lailah, wherever you are make the best out of that place.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
― Umberto Eco

“Cas sighed. ‘I guess,’ he shrugged. ‘Ever heard of the academic voice?’
The door opened. Jasper was dressed in stained clothes – day clothes. Gone was the robe and crusty night shirt. His bushy eyebrows shaded his milky eyes.
‘The academic voice?’ Jasper seemed to chew the bitter words. He squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. He raised his hand in front of him, moving it as he spoke as if he was conducting some invisible orchestra. ‘Hear my voice from on-high and tremble all ye oppressors of good sense and intellectual advancement. Heed my words, students: relinquish thine will and let me oppress thee instead, for he who is not under my heel cannot learn.’ His arm dropped to his side, and he seem to shrink slightly, as if elocution was the air in his lungs. ‘This voice you are looking for,’ he said quietly, ‘sounds like the slap of mortar on brick. It builds walls between those who think they know and those who thirst to know.”
― Marcel M. du Plessis, The Silent Symphony

“It's deplorable that academia should prostitute itself, but there it is. Not even Harvard is above it. In fact, Harvard least of all, with that ludicrous delusion of self-importance that makes every Harvard professor feel he's a public intellectual, qualified to comment on issues far beyond his expertise.”
― Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

“So, if I become an associate professor, everyone will assume it’s the same as an assistant professor.”
― Gillian Polack, Borderlanders

“She never knew how
Hard it could truly get until
She was drowning, just
Beneath the surface,
Unable to catch even a
Breath of air as she
Strangled herself, encumbering
Herself with
Meaningless tasks and studies, burdening
Herself with
Meaningless thoughts and duties,
No matter how much her heart
Willed her to rest,
Her brain told her to
Keep going, and, inevitably,
She broke”
― -L.S.

“One of the more interesting things you'll notice in the entire history of poetry & poets, art & artists is those useless untalented individuals that call themselves " experts" or " critics" . The sad fact is that throughout that same history people actually were gullible and listened to them and bought their books or paintings. We no longer live in the age where poets were mass- read or rockstars but even now, in the 21st century we unfortunately must still deal with these ridiculous fops who merely give themselves these titles and use this as a tool to destroy or slander, debase or tear apart the works of other more talented poets so that their needy lackluster words will steal the other poets thunder and limelight to make themselves the center of attention. How pathetic is that? Very pathetic indeed. Hence ? We are far smarter than those who once fell for these self centered antics and we have thankfully made these manipulative con artists extinct. POETRY & ART is for EVERYBODY. From different countries, backgrounds and cultures. And the myth of experts or critics has finally been flushed down the toilet where they belong. Their words & voices now meaning what it was in the first place. NOTHING.”
― R.M. Engelhardt , WHERE THERE IS NO VISION POEMS 2020 R.M. ENGELHARDT

“Fortunately, the metamorphosis came too late to permit me to go back to graduate school. And thus I escaped indoctrination. Whatever I learned about developmental psychology and social psychology, I learned on my own. I was an outsider looking in, and that has made all the difference. I did not buy
into the assumptions of the academic establishment. I was not indebted to their granting agencies. And, once I had given up writing textbooks, I was not required to perpetuate the status quo by teaching the received gospel to a bunch of credulous college students. I gave up writing textbooks because one day it suddenly occurred to me that many of the things I had been telling those credulous college students were wrong.”
― Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

“Someone who thinks up a new theory is the last person who should be trusted with the job of testing it. A new theory should be tested by independent researchers who aren’t cronies of the theorist and who don’t have an axe to grind. It’s division of labor again: proposing theories and doing research to test them are jobs that should be carried out by different entities.

“A good theory should go in advance of the evidence,” the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller said in a recent interview. “It should stick its neck out and say, this is how I think the world is, and leave it to other people to test it.”

Making a virtue of necessity, I will leave it to other people to test my theory.”
― Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

“Todos estamos hoy integrados en la cultura de masas, incluidos los críticos apocalípticos que la consideran la antítesis de la cultura .Nadie está al margen de la música pop, la manera en la que nos relacionemos con ella puede cambiar, y de hecho cambia, de unos a otros, pero es imposible no relacionarnos con ella”
― Juan Carlos Fernández Serrato, Hacia una teoría del pop

“Wisdom is the Application of Knowledge”
― Dr. Amy Poh Ai Ling

“I have an uncompromising principle against the use of AI in literature.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“While it may be hard to live with generalizations, it is inconceivable to live without them.”
― Peter Gay, Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture, 1815-1914