Academic Potential Quotes

I was a really good student. In the sixth grade, I was reading at a twelfth grade reading level. But I got bored.

Today, this young woman is me, a Nobel laureate. I'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish, in my tiny capacity, of little African girls - the wish of being educated. We set up a foundation. We're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential.

I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father's income was such that I wouldn't have got a grant, and he wouldn't let me go to university, and that was the end of it.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste was the slogan, but now it's 95 and it's don't forget the Trojan.

I feel blessed I can address students who are the future of India.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

I could have been a Rhodes Scholar, except for my grades.

I wouldn't apply myself at school. I was quite bright, but I didn't do much with it, and I thought acting was dressing up and shouting for a living.

And certainly having gone to Oxford, and seen some of the other students there, I wouldn't say the ones at my school were less capable. They could've been there.

If you're always at the head of the class, then you're in the wrong class.

I see bright kids trapped in public schools that are just warehousing them. As an educator this makes me scared. As Secretary of State, this makes me terrified.

Scholastically, I did enough to get by, but I was smarter than I let on.

Intelligence is a separate gift, for the benefit of students, so that they may think of themselves as intellectual and not very intelligent, or intelligent and not very intellectual. One hopes, of course, that they try to bring the two virtues, the two elements, into their lives at the same time.

And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they are ill- educated, become the worst?

Maybe you think, 'I'm not college material.' Maybe you worry that you don't have the money. Then you take the SAT. You see that colleges are getting in touch with you. You begin to think maybe you are ready for college.

I had a ninth grade teacher who told me I was much smarter and much better than I was allowing myself to be.

I don't regard the fact that there's a disparity in test scores nearly as importantly as I do the need for diversity, because I know from long experience that test scores, though useful, are a very limited measure of things that matter in choosing students.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.

At the end of the day, teachers aren't going to mess about trying to make me into an Einstein, 'cause it was never gonna happen. We can't all be brainy, can we? That's just the way the world is.

At school, I was a lot more advanced compared to the other kids but I didn't like authority and was kicked out for fighting.

Mom is always saying I'm a smart kid, but that I just don't apply myself.

Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.

Usually, when a young girl is pregnant, she drops out of school and concentrates on being a mother. I thought that's what I had to do, but my counselors told me there was no way they would let me drop out. I had too much promise.

Our eldest boy, Bob, has been away from us nearly a year at school, and will enter Harvard University this month. He promises verywell, considering we never controlled him much.