Academia Quotes

Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

When I was at Stanford, I was actually in the cancer biology program, but I mostly focused on infectious disease.

… the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race … Properly the Jew ought hardly to be hears of; but he is hears of, has always been heard of … His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

At the end of the day, I'm a very boring academic, bogged down with academia and structure and delivering an education.

The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.

Academia is ruled by a pathological herd mentality. Stick out, and be prepared to get ostracized.

95% of economics is common sense deliberately made complicated.

Masters of Sex is the degree I got from Boston College.

Definitely, in any teaching situation, there are the clueless students; then there are the ones who get it a little quicker.

I really like knowledge and reading books and just generally immersing myself in information.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

My interest in political philosophy was rather casual until I met Hayek.

[Logic and philosophy] were of no use, in the church or the state, in the cloister or the court, in peace or war, at home or abroad or anywhere but in the schools

I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics.

It shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them…

At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things - teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part.

A lot of the progress in machine learning - and this is an unpopular opinion in academia - is driven by an increase in both computing power and data. An analogy is to building a space rocket: You need a huge rocket engine, and you need a lot of fuel.

My dad was an English professor.

There are not many academic disciplines that have their own section in a book store. History is one.

I come from an academic background, and I have a genuine interest in social change.

Communism has defeated itself everywhere except... in American colleges.

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

My mom is like this hard-core, liberal feminist. She's a professor in Boston, and she's been teaching women's studies for 30 years and international politics.