Gary Hamel Quotes

In an ideal world, you might imagine that scientific papers were only cited by academics on the basis of their content. This might be true. But lots of other stuff can have an influence.

A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

I don't need to be validated by academia, because that presupposes that academia is a pure endeavor and not guided by market forces, which is not the case.

By giving professors jobs for life, universities create a feeling of unanswerable power among too many. Tenured professors who are uninterested in serving the student body are less likely to respond favorably to criticism, and are more likely to feel the freedom to intimidate or harass those with opposing viewpoints.

The Oxford manner is, alas, indefinable; I was going to say indefensible.

I love to walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble and see my books there. It's fabulous.

Take a look at the books other people have in their homes.

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

There's nothing more distasteful than an academic having to, like, trot out his credentials. You really come off as a jerk when you do that.

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, 'The Dante Club.' I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it's such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.

Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.

I never did care much for the upholstery of office.

Economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality

I've always been a fan of space exploration, and I filled our entire office with space artifacts.

When I interviewed Paul Bremer in his office, he had almost no books on his shelves. He had a couple of management books, like 'Leadership' by Rudolph Giuliani. I didn't take it as an encouraging sign.

If you are a natural scientist, a publication the journal Science carries enormous prestige.

I have a piano in my office, and sometimes during meetings, I'll sit down and goof on the keyboard a little bit.

No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three people in our field.

Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.

Bernanke has cultivated this idea that he is a brilliant scholar of The Great Depression, but that’s not true at all.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may - need is the word I use - to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed.