Quotes About Academics

There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.

Realize that such comments are to be expected from academics. We are a pathetically contentious lot. We want others not only to be aware of our work but to admire it and, better still, to defer to the conclusions we have drawn. The problem is that our colleagues seek the same admiration and deference from us. Something has to give, and as a result, on campuses everywhere, academics routinely engage in verbal fisticuffs. Put-downs are commonplace, and insults fly.

I'm amused when financial planners and academics talk about methods that predict a 40-year success rate of, say, 95%. If you think about it, this implies that our political and financial institutions will remain intact for about the next millenium (40 years divided by a failure rate of 5% equals 800 years). Considering the history of human civilization, this is a pretty heroic assumption.

Don't know much about history Don't know much biology.

Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.

The steady improvement in [home] sales will support price appreciation...[despite] all the wild projections by academics, Wall Street analysts, and others in the media.

I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.

I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.

I went to college to play football, not to study it.

My favorite subjects were astronomy, sociology, and gender studies. And I always loved math class; I have a thing for numbers. I played soccer freshman year and then realized I hate sweating, but looking back, I definitely should have kept up with sports.

Likewise, the division between popular and serious work was a scheme perpetrated by academics in need of creating a false pantheon of living writers when it became impossible to come up with fresh dissertation topics (to earn degrees and prestige) concerning the writers in the true pantheon, who had been analyzed to exhaustion.

Low-income students stuck in schools located in high-poverty areas are surrounded by peers who, because they have had less opportunity, are typically less academically engaged and more likely to act out than those in schools in higher-income neighborhoods.

academics must maintain a delicate balance between necessary humility and the determination

You should see the way this college is studying!

And this man will be our president—this intelligent, well-read man, this man who speaks of restoring science to its rightful place. Restore the scientific process; restore democracy. This is what we needed—to develop a core identity as American academics, the people who would make sure a Galileo was never again put under house arrest for making challenging claims about who we really are. Make

I had accidentally stumbled onto something much more surreal—a whole fraternity of beleaguered and bandaged academics who had produced scholarship offensive to one identity group or another and who had consequently been the subject of various forms of shout-downs.

There are transcendent collective events. There is anger spreading through the streets of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, anger marking in black the unallowable, the intolerable, anger that hurls itself beyond all that can reasonably be expected or demanded. This anger is the most precious gift of the disinherited to tourists and academics who have imprisoned their hearts through so many years of well-paid compromises and betrayals

I'd never taken an SAT prep course. They were for weaker students.

I was shocked, and I ended up contacting three academics to find out if it could possibly be that my grandmother was a courtesan.

Singing is actually my favourite thing to do in the world - so when you don't consider yourself as talented at anything academically, and there is one thing you're good at, I think it's best to follow what you're good at.

What excites me about America is its social mobility, people continually rising from the bottom to the top and altering the culture in the process. On another level, however, we remain a nation that lives in social ghettos. Celebrities generally congregate around other celebrities; academics and intellectuals are cloistered in their worlds; people like to associate with those of their kind. If we leave these narrow worlds, it is usually as an observer of another way of life.

Far too many people—many of them academics, many politicians—continue to jabber about a supposed 'special relationship' between our two coun

I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.

A particularly cruel irony inherent in the targeting of Israeli academics, artists, and intellectuals is that a disproportionate number of them publicly oppose many of Israel's settlement policies. Instead of encouraging their efforts, BDS lumps them in with the very people and policies that they oppose. All this does is bar Israeli advocates for change from participating in the larger conversation with like-minded Palestinian individuals, and instead empower extremists on both sides.