Quotes About Oxford

In 1933 the students of the Oxford Union, under the inspiration of a Mr. Joad, passed their ever-shameful resolution, "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.

Funny Debates at both Cambridge and Oxford eventually helped to convince me that the only place to be amusing is in a serious context.

Much of his time at Oxford passed by his own account under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He was dismayed by the undergraduates' relentless snobbery and unremitting emphasis on money.

There are plenty of dogs in the town of Oxford.  Montmorency had eleven fights on the first day, and fourteen on the second, and evidently thought he had got to heaven.

I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

The students' union and the student body work hard to support the university in encouraging applicants from diverse backgrounds to apply to Oxford.

And certainly having gone to Oxford, and seen some of the other students there, I wouldn't say the ones at my school were less capable. They could've been there.

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.

Aung San Suu Kyi's late husband, Michael Aris, was a good friend of mine at St Antony's, Oxford. The gentlest of gentle academics, he helped establish a centre in Tibetan studies at Oxford and converted to Buddhism.

Oxford is wonderful. I'm having a great time. We do go out, but I still try to spend most of my time studying in the library.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.

What I learned at Oxford has been used to great advantage throughout my business career.

She had asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy? The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer. When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her how to reach Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, but he might still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion. She felt as safe with him as she'd done with Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear.

Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child's life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

Will, I used to come here in my Oxford and sit on this exact same bench whenever I wanted to be alone, just me and Pan. What I thought was that if you - maybe just once a year - if we could come here at the same time, just for an hour or something, then we could pretend we were close again-because we would be close, if you sat here and I sat just here in my world - Yes, he said, as long as I live, I'll come back. Whenever I am in the world, I'll come back here -

Since coming home to Oxford after that strange adventure, they had told no one about it, and exercised the most scrupulous care to keep it a secret; but sometimes, and more often recently, they simply had to get away from each other.

A good short history of the development of the drift hypothesis and the final emergence of plate tectonics is given in A. Hallam, A Revolution in the Earth Sciences: From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)

There are several excellent general histories of scientific method. One of the most popular introductory-level books is A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, by John Losee, third edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993

I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And this is the Bridge of Sighs, where Lord Peter proposed (in Latin) to Harriet,' and everyone suddenly came to life and began snapping pictures. Such is the power of books.

My work, my love of words, became my refuge, both when I was working on bilingual dictionaries for Oxford University Press and then via my involvement with 'Countdown' - and now 'Catsdown,' as I call it.

The demon trapped in the summoning circle screamed, slamming its crablike pincers against the unseen barrier, hurling its chitinous shoulders from side to side in an effort to escape the confinement. It couldn't. I kept my will on the circle, kept the demon from bursting free. Satisfied, Chauncy? I asked it. The demon straightened its hideous form and said, in a perfect Oxford accent, Quite. You understand, I must observe the formalities.