Academia Quotes

“That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Let's turn now to the citation of authors, found in other books and missing in yours. The solution to this is very simple, because all you have to do is find a book that cites them all from A to Z, as you put it. Then you'll put that same alphabet in your book, and though the lie is obvious it doesn't matter, since you'll have little need to use them; perhaps someone will be naive enough to believe you have consulted all of them in your plain and simple history; if it serves no other purpose, at least a lengthy catalogue of authors will give the book an unexpected authority. Furthermore, no one will try to determine if you followed them or did not follow them, having nothing to gain from that.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.”
― Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered

“Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.

"Well, Eve -- it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."

But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I esteem my colleagues as I do my own self, I esteem them for two things: because they are able to find perfect felicity in specialized knowledge and because they are not apt to commit physical murder.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

“The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“Globalization is not just about changing relations between the ‘inside’ of the nation-state and the ‘outside’ of the international system. It cuts across received categories, creating myriad multilayered intersections, overlapping playing fields, and actors skilled at working across these boundaries. People are at once rooted and rootless, local producers and global consumers, threatened in their identities yet continually remaking those identities.”
― Philip G. Cerny

“To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“Shulman argues that work that is valued is work that is presented to colleagues. The failure to make this kind of wider connection weakens the sense of community. This happens in scholarly life when such essential functions as professional service or teaching do not get discussed openly or often enough.”
― Charles E. Glassick, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate

“There is no shame in not knowing something. The shame is not being willing to learn.”
― Alison Croggon, The Naming

“I am a master of folklore - I should be able to throw folklore fireballs or something.”
― Michael R. Underwood

“A dean is the conductor of an orchestra made up entirely of composers.”
― Mark William Roche, Why Choose the Liberal Arts?

“These are quite obviously the books that nobody reads,’ said Rocky, studying their titles. ‘But it’s a comfort to know that they are here if you ever should want to read them. I’m sure I should find them more entertaining than the more up-to-date ones. Wild Beasts and their Ways; Five Years with the Congo Cannibals; With Camera and Pen in Northern Nigeria; Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia. I wish people still wrote books with titles like that. Nowadays I believe it simply isn’t done to show a photograph of “The Author with his Pygmy Friends”—we have become too depressingly scientific.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute”
― Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

“The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present-day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.”
― Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

“Favoritism was well and fine if she was the favorite.”
― R. F. Kuang

“I am not your peer (Naskaristana 2734-2735)

I spent my youth building reputation,
then I spent a life setting fire to it,
because reputation among sectarian apes
only means that I've failed as a human.

Either you build reputation
or you build civilization -
there is no greater dishonor than
being respected across the mental asylum.

Early Naskar, 2015-17, was mostly borrowed
research with occasional original Naskar,
mid Naskar, 2017-21, was mostly original Naskar
with occasional borrowed data,
late phase Naskar, 2021 onward, is pure Naskar,
beyond the scale and scope of institutions.

I'm not your peer that you can review me,
you grew up believing world war 2
as the big battle between good and evil,
you grew up worshipping churchill as hero,
you believe philosophy was invented in greece,
with that kind of prehistoric intellect
you're going to review a multicultural mind -

you don't peer review the Himalayas,
you chart the course according
to your own limited capacity,
so you may one day climb the summit,
and when you do, I'll be waiting with a cup of tea.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“I’m not your peer that you can review me, you grew up believing world war 2 as the big battle between good and evil, you grew up worshipping churchill as hero, you believe philosophy was invented in greece, with that kind of prehistoric intellect you’re going to review a multicultural mind – you don’t peer review the Himalayas, you chart the course according to your own limited capacity, so you may one day climb the summit, and when you do, I’ll be waiting with a cup of tea.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Early Naskar, 2015-17, was mostly borrowed research with occasional original Naskar, mid Naskar, 2017-21, was mostly original Naskar with occasional borrowed data, late phase Naskar, 2021 onward, is pure Naskar, beyond the scale and scope of institutions.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Either you build reputation or you build civilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“I spent my youth building reputation, then I spent a life setting fire to it, because reputation among sectarian apes only means that I’ve failed as a human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“The reading break began and those who liked books stopped reading.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Textbooks are like visible light, they only reveal a tiny, microscopic, biased sliver of reality, while 99.9965% of the electromagnetic spectrum remain nonexistent to the mighty brains of apekind. Real education happens outside the textbook.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace