Higher Education Quotes

“They're so cold, these scholars!
May lightning strike their food
so that their mouths learn how
to eat fire!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You start to live when you commit your life to cause higher than yourself. You must learn to depend on divine power for the fulfillment of a higher calling.”
― Lailah GiftyAkita

“5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media:

1 Post content that add value
2 Spread positivity
3 Create steady stream of info
4 Make an impact
5 Be yourself”
― Germany Kent

“This institution of higher education had no such concept as mercy.”
― Marina Dyachenko, Vita Nostra

“...the state of Virginia had turned down twenty-one thousand women for admission to state colleges in 1970 while not turning away a single man...”
― Meg Waite Clayton

“[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.)

What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine."

A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?”
― William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom'

“Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality

“The principal benefit of studying philosophy is that is makes everything else seem easy, or shallow, or nonsensical.”
― Neel Burton, Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking

“A key aspect of a successful education is early involvement outside the classroom and internships. It's going to be a changed world. Real-world interactions will begin outside the classroom. This would greatly improve Asia's educational system.”
― Siddhartha Paul Tiwari

“Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected:
‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.’
Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf?
Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forces’ earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoples’ collective consciousness.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“Dismantling and destroying Iraqi education was not just ‘collateral damage’ from the occupation: it was part and parcel of the occupation forces’ deliberate efforts to restructure the Iraqi state, society, and identity as many testimonies in this study make clear.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“The experiences of academics captured here show that this was done primarily through three 'cleansing methods': first, through direct death threats and assassinations of academics and professionals who were no longer wanted in post-occupation Iraq; second, by igniting sectarian violence that significantly contributed to turning Iraq from a unified, central state with strong institutions in place, into divided zones run by militias and militant groups…and third, many academics were removed/cleansed through the notorious and controversial policy of 'de-Baʿathification.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“Tethering one's pedagogy to notions of social justice and activism affords an automatic claim to moral superiority and, by extension, social legitimacy, which most undergraduate students cannot readily distinguish from intellectual competency.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“Better education leads to more opportunities in life. An investment in higher education put you amongst future leaders that can enhance your thinking, and allow you to thrive in thought-provoking conversations that will put you in a winning situation in which everyone comes out ahead.”
― Germany Kent

“Better education leads to more opportunities in life. An investment in higher education puts you amongst future leaders that can enhance your thinking, and allow you to thrive in thought-provoking conversations that will give you a winning edge in society.”
― Germany Kent

“Higher education collapses if the morals and character fail to prove and show that.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“I became an editor. They pay me for my work. I became a fellow. Words I never knew to be -- I am.”
― Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries

“Education Through Excellence (The Sonnet)

During my aimless years I once had an urge,
To learn about jet propulsion engine.
So I wrote content for tech support websites,
To buy a couple of books on aeronautics.
Education means catering to curiosity,
Study to gain excellence not a certificate.
If it doesn't open your eyes to social ascension,
Education only causes the world to dehydrate.
You can stuff entire encyclopedias into your head,
That still will not make you an educated being.
If education was the same thing as information,
Google would be the omniscient superbeing.
Certificate without humanity is a ticket to stoneage.
If it takes away your warmth, it is all decadence.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“A reasonable person can broadly interpret objects, theories , equations, principles, and literature without specialized education. However a person who earned proper specialized education posses thorough understanding of a specific kind of object, theory, equation, principle, and/or literature.”
― Saaif Alam

“Helene's interest in economics had waned considerably over the years. More and more, the theories that tried to explain economic phenomena, to predict their developments, appeared almost equally inconsistent and random. She was more and more tempted to liken them to pure and simple charlatanism; it was even surprising, she occasionally thought, that they gave a Nobel Prize for economics, as if this discipline could boast the same methodological seriousness, the same intellectual rigor, as chemistry, or physics. And her interest in teaching had also waned considerably. On the whole, young people no longer interested her much. Her students were at such a terrifyingly low intellectual level that, sometimes, you had to wonder what had pushed them into studying in the first place. The only reply, she knew in her heart of hearts, was that they wanted to make money, as much money as possible; aside from a few short-term humanitarian fads, that was the only thing that really got them going. Her professional life could thus be summarized as teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins, even if she avoided formulating it to herself in terms that stark.”
― Michel Houellebecq, La carte et le territoire

“The unique epistemic role of the university in our culture was to set up conditions where students could learn how to bring arguments and evidence to a question, and to teach them not to project convictions derived from tribal loyalties onto the evaluation of evidence on testable questions. The rise of identity politics should have been recognized by university faculties as a threat to their ability to teach decoupled argumentation and evidence evaluation. As a monistic ideology (Tetlock 1986), where all values come from a single perspective, identity politics entangles many testable propositions with identity-based convictions. It fosters myside bias by reversing Kahan’s (2016) prescription—by transforming positions on policy-relevant facts into badges of group-based convictions. One of the most depressing social trends of the last few decades has been universities becoming proponents of identity politics—a doctrine that attacks the heart of their intellectual mission.”
― Keith E. Stanovich, The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

“Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either. All of this works by design. It is to ensure that enough of us keep our heads down, focus on surviving our nine-to-five jobs, don’t ask questions, and don’t demand more from a system that owes us a lot. The death of American higher education will harm the most vulnerable of us first, but its goal is not to harm or oppress only us—that work is fully implanted in all our systems. Its goal is to continue to oppress and exploit white supremacy’s most powerful tool: the angry white working-class man.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

“Certificate without humanity is a ticket to stoneage.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“Sketchbooks are fascinating; they are a window into an artist's or designer's mind, revealing their unique way of looking at or thinking about the world. However, the sketchbook has become a much fetishised object featured in countless books, blog's and social-media accounts showcasing stylised and curated examples that few can emulate. It is no wonder that at some point on the Foundation course every student articulates anxiety or frustration over their own sketchbook: it's too big, too small, too messy, too contrived, I can't draw, what's it for?
So why do we work with a sketchbook and what is it really for?”
― Lucy Alexander, The Central Saint Martins Guide to Art & Design: Key lessons from the world-renowned Foundation course

“Lazy looking is not really looking at all. It is when we guess or approximate things. When you really interrogate what you are looking at and challenge yourself to use and invent a wide range of approaches to capturing what you see, your drawing's will start to reflect your unique way of looking.”
― Lucy Alexander, The Central Saint Martins Guide to Art & Design: Key lessons from the world-renowned Foundation course

“The majority of effort channeled toward achieving racial equity hasn't been applied to the part of life that has the biggest influence on people's skills and mindsets: namely birth to eighteen years of age.”
― Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

“By [college], many skills, attitudes, and habits have already been formed. We can have a much bigger impact on people at younger ages. Efforts to achieve true equity should focus instead on high-quality kindergarten and pre-K, high-quality weekend learning programs, high-quality charter schools, and high-quality after-school tutoring.”
― Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

“The future of education is not a pre-written script, but a story waiting to be co-authored – by Talent Alchemists, educators, policymakers, and learners alike. By embracing innovation, prioritizing ethics, and fostering collaboration, we can ensure that chip-enabled learning becomes a force for positive change in the ever-evolving landscape of education.”
― Nitya Prakash, EDUCATION 2050

“Inspiring and changing lives, teachers are vital to building a strong and prosperous society, touching the minds and hearts of future generations”
― Siddhartha Paul Tiwari

“Philosophy is the only study that is truly liberal, insofar as it is the only study that can liberate the soul. By comparison, all others are trifling and childish.”
― Neel Burton, Augustus: Invitation to Philosophy