Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

This great Western institution, the university, dominates the world today more than any other institution: more than the church, more than the government, more than all other institutions. All the leaders of government are graduates of universities, or at least of secondary schools or colleges whose administrators and teachers are themselves graduates of universities….professionals—doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. have all passed through the mill of the secondary school, the college and the university. And the men of the media are university trained

Universities are good at long term thinking. Of the 85 institutions in the world that were in existence 500 years ago, 70 of them are universities.

The profuseness of the Arabian learning, the multiplicity of the departments into which it entered, its zeal, the enormous proportions of the resulting literature, the vast libraries, the schools, the lecture rooms with their thousands of students, the universities, the institutions devoted to special sciences, the observatories and laboratories so royally equipped, the schools of logic and grammar, the whole attractive republic of letters, in which princes mingled with the sons of tradesmen or mechanics, while court favorites vied with impoverished authors for the honors of literature, all the ardor of a great intellectual movement passing before our eyes under Oriental guise, dispose the mind to enthusiastic judgments.

The true and correct solution to eradicating discrimination is by establishing religious Sepharadi educational institutions. This is one of the reasons Shas was founded.

Stereotyped as convention-going, pocket-protector-wearing, chess-playing, infrequently-showering types, nerds are one of our society's most ridiculed groups. And, for a university with an international reputation as a bastion of intellectualism, Harvard is startlingly devoid of them.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

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.

In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

It is certain that every class is interested in [educational] establishments which give to the human mind its highest improvements, and to every Country its truest and most durable celebrity.

I've decided life is too fragile to finish a book I dislike just because it cost $16.95 and everyone else loved it. Or eat a fried egg with a broken yolk (which I hate) when the dog would leap over the St. Louis Arch for it.

There's an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school's president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department - his field - and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist-this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul-a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

A saint has to be a misfit. A person who embodies what his culture considers typical or normal cannot be exemplary.

I am trying for nothing so hard in my own personal life as how not to be respectable when married.

I'm a very feminine man. I like feminine things. I don't go to strip clubs. I don't drink beer. I don't play sports.

The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.

Most people don't see that they have options beyond what society tells them to do. That's the biggest problem. They honestly believe that compliance is the shortcut to success.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

One time, the Library of Congress was giving books to local libraries around the country on Islam. The library of a guy named Walter Jones, who's a member of Congress from North Carolina, got some books and resource materials, and he got up in the press and said he didn't want any Muslim books in the library. And the people said, "Wait a minute, that's kind of anti-Muslim." He said, "Oh no, Keith Ellison is a friend of mine." And I said, "You know what? We are friends, but you're wrong about this.

Too often an institution serves to bless the majority opinion. Today when too many move to the rhythmic beat of the status quo, whoever would be a Christian must be a nonconformist.

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