Andrew Greeley Quotes

Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.

It's no fun to be a bluestocking in a family of jockstraps.

For hym was levere have at his beddes heed Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie.

I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy.

I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.

Were I not a king, I would be a university man.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

In some ways I've gone to Cash and Carter graduate school.

I didn't know many classes where I could try and relate the thing that I really loved and wanted to do into an intellectual idea.

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.

I don't have specific television ambitions in the sense that I remain fundamentally and academic, and so, my innermost ambitions are what's the next discovery I can make; that's in my direct center.

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship.

Part of me wanted to get a graduate degree in political science. Had I done that, I suppose I would have become a college professor.

If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library [the Bodleian].

Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

I've seen it over the years, the more intellectual they are, the more work they don't want to do. You have to do both, you have to be able to put in the graft.

My family was scientifically inclined: My brother did turn into a neurophysiologist, and I almost became a scientist myself. I could have gone that way.

Books to judicious compilers, are useful; to particular arts and professions, they are absolutely necessary; to men of real science, they are tools: but more are tools to them.

We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.