Quotes About Academia

It would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Mathematical Mark all mathematical heads, which be only and wholly bent to those sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, and how unapt to serve in the world.

I hope the necessity will at length be seen of establishing institutions, here as in Europe, where every branch of science, useful at this day, may be taught in it's highest degrees.

Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.

Christians think a long record of church attendence and Bible reading is equivalent to an advanced degree in science.

The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'.

Investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.

My fellow academics, taken as a group, are just as reluctant to engage in genuine reflection as the less highly educated person in the street. Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don't get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.*6

Yet the world, including many in the media, academia, and even diplomacy, seems to accept Palestinian violence as cultural. On the other hand, something different is expected from Israelis. This is cultural relativism bordering on racism. To expect less of Palestinians, regardless of their grievances, is to diminish their humanity.

No Oxford don was forgiven for writing books outside his field of study—except for detective stories which dons, like everyone else, read when they are down with the 'flu. But it was considered unforgivable that Lewis wrote international best-sellers, and worse still that many were of a religious nature." Lewis

We need laws written by people who have confronted life in the real world, not in the sheltered world of trust fund recipients of the insulated cocoon of academia.

I don't have any friends in English Departments.

Scientists are seldom familiar with the details of research beyond their own discipline.

I save him my diatribe about people with bullshit EdDs and PsyDs that I've run into in academia who couldn't pass a fifth-grade science exam all insisting that they be addressed with the same reverence as the head of oncology at a research hospital.

There is a business built around racial grievance. And that business is booming at such a level that white people are like hey, I'm going to adopt a whole new identity so I can benefit from being Baby Al Sharpton, Baby Jesse Jackson, and in academia, this has been embraced and she has been able to pull off this scam.

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly.

I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.

Bastions of free-flowing discussion with civil exchange are the academic ideal. But during my time in academia, it became increasingly clear that prisons of political correctness with peer-engendered public shaming are now the academic reality.

Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

Academic writing is such a different way of writing.

I'm not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.