Scholarly Debate Quotes

Do I get grief for the fact that in communicating, say, about the baboons I'm doing so much anthropomorphizing? One hopes that the parts that are blatantly ridiculous will be perceived as such. I've nonetheless been stunned by some of my more humorless colleagues - to see that they were not capable of recognizing that.

To defend your major is pretty tough.

This Moses, I say, this man of old time, whose existence and character you are trying to elucidate, matters to nobody but scholars like you.

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

As an academic, I value the free exchange of ideas.

Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses.

The ideological posturing, moral nitpicking, and clique formation that occur in places such as academic Twitter have more to do with crafting a scene than building a movement. And scholars, of all people, should be able to recognize these dynamics, call them into question, and make more reasonable decisions about how to engage with their colleagues, whether in agreement or debate.

I think academics are infuriating. For every expert on Shakespeare there is another one to cancel his theory out. It drives you up the wall. I think the greatest form of finding out the truth is through fantasy.

No, this customary aim of research by excavators is completely foreign to the historical work with which I am occupied... my sole and only aim is to be able to establish a historical fact, on which I disagree with some eminent historians and geographers.

Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew.

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.

When the adversaries of Erasmus had got the Trinity into his edition, they threw by their manuscript as an old almanac out of date.

Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I'm not interested in theories per se.

One group of scholars or persons, most of them politically motivated, say the Holocaust occurred. Then there is the group of scholars who represent the opposite position and have therefore been imprisoned for the most part. Hence, an impartial group has to come together to investigate and to render an opinion on this very important subject, because the clarification of this issue will contribute to the solution of global problems.

However, I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly, especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

For hundreds of years the use of the word 'man' has troubled critical scholars, careful translators, and lawyers. Difficulties occur whenever and wherever it is important for truth-seeking purposes to know what is being talked about and the context gives no intimation whether 'man' means just a human being irrespective of sex or means a masculine being and none other.

They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform.

How long it takes for reforms of ritual ceremonies to be discussed among scholars who all have their own ideas.

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.