Academic Discourse Quotes

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.

There are a significant number of learned men and women who hold that any successful effort to make ideas lively, intelligible and interesting is a manifestation of deficient scholarship. This is the fortress behind which the minimally coherent regularly find refuge.

If you're also in the arena and you're putting your ideas out and you're owning them and you're saying "I disagree with you about this and that, I think you've got this wrong" - then not only do I invite that, I freaking love that. I love that. I'm an academic. I'm hardwired for a good debate.

God! How men of letters are stupid.

And seek for truth in the groves of Academy

Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.

There is an intellectual snobbery that, regrettably, many academics suffer from. They are proud their paper is only read by a small group of people - makes it very exclusive. Let's get rid of that. If it's truly important, people should be excited about it.

This paper will no doubt be found interesting by those who take an interest in it.

There is a whole school of Canadian academics, media personalities, and politicians whose definition of a Canadian is a North American who fears or dislikes the United States.

Academical disputation gives vigor and briskness to the mind thus exercised, and relieves the languor of private study and meditation.

I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study - are not likely to get much attention.

I'm taking a philosophy class and regretting it with everything in me. I'm taking one college class per semester. Philosophy is studying what you already know and dismantling it. I thought it would be right up my alley. I can't tell you how much it's not me.

The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.

A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate.

Now, academics are not always the easiest people to talk to, and the scholarly papers aren't always the easiest papers to read, but frankly, psychology papers, especially papers and books on terrorism, are very easy to read, and journalists should be reading them.

I taught. I lectured at universities. I spoke to my students. I spoke in certain public forums. But what I didn't do was respond to microphones being thrust in my face and saying, what is your relationship with Obama and are you an unrepentant terrorist?

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

History is an accumulative science, gradually gathering truth through the steady and plodding efforts of countless practitioners turning out countless monographs

When 'The Bell Curve' came out, I'd have lectures with lots of people chanting and picketing with signs, but it was always within the confines of the event and I was eventually able to speak.