Academic Legacy Quotes

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry.

I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.

I am now about to set seriously to work upon preparing for the press an account of my theory of Logic and Probabilities which in its present state I look upon as the most valuable if not the only valuable contribution that I have made or am likely to make to Science and the thing by which I would desire if at all to be remembered hereafter.

I have been a Professor Emeritus since 1958, and have continued my scientific studies.

A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future

I've written important articles on prevention, on the concept of the preventive state, how the law is moving much more in an area of trying to prevent wrongs than trying to deal with them after they occur. That will be my academic/intellectual legacy.

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

My father, Emil Palade, was professor of philosophy, and my mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was a teacher. The family environment explains why I acquired early in life great respect for books, scholars and education.

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.

It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today.

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.

That's what the Ivy League is. And many of the people there are legacy. Their families went there; their families are in government. The kids go there.

I learned many things from Professor Brown, including his philosophy toward research, but there is one thing he said that I recall with particular clarity: 'Do research that will be in the textbooks.' It is not easy to do such work, but this has remained my motto.

People remember Longfellow wrote Hiawatha, quite forget he was a Professor of Modern Languages!

I've lived to see key parts of my research absorbed in textbooks and in central banks around the world. And some finance ministries, too.

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back

Harvard is the home of American ideas.

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years.

Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.

You never replace a great scholar who retires. If you try to do that, you end up with burnt-out volcanoes.

My father was a chemist on the Yale faculty, my mother a housewife.

No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere.