Academia Quotes

“It is astounding, in truth, how much of academia’s perceived resource scarcity is artificially constructed.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Because at Warren, the Body is all the rage. As though everyone in the academic world has just now discovered that they are vesseled in precarious, fastly decaying houses of bone and flesh and my god, what material.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny

“People seemed to live so differently in the past, with real purpose and romance—true romance—born of suffering and sacrifice and courage, not this modern-day idea of romance made up of cheap words, alcohol, and trivial gestures….yet she also knew this was a stupid desire, a product of her peaceful, privileged life that romanticized suffering as a way to feel something deep and meaningful.”
― Susie Yang, In These Hallowed Halls: A Dark Academia Anthology

“Rejections are the bread and butter of all academic journeys. [..,] The good thing is, the more rejections you get, the easier they are to swallow.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Below Zero

“In our own day, there has been too much of a tendency towards authority, and too little care for the preservation of initiative. Men in control of vast organisations have tended to be too abstract in their outlook, to forget what actual human beings are like, and to try to fit men to systems rather than systems to men.”
― Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual

“If academia ever makes you feel like you're not good enough or smart enough... it's not you, it's academia.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“Academia was nothing but a bunch of busy people running around busily.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“O that we were wise, Ion, and that you could truly call us so; but you rhapsodes and actors, and the poets whose verses you sing, are wise; whereas I am a common man, who only speaks the truth. For consider what a very commonplace and trivial things this which I have said - a thing which any man might say: that when a man has acquired a knowledge of a whole art, the enquiry into good and bad is one and the same.”
― Plato, Ion

“To feel history through the things it left behind. But to do that is not to be with the living... It's dead. All of it. That's the real task of a scholar, to become a necromancer... so many of us forget the true purpose is to reanimate the thing. Even, sometimes, at the cost of animating ourselves.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“He saw himself as a hated prier into the homes of strangers, a kind of intellectual charlatan rationalizing his own prurience into scientific curiosity; someone at once lower and more pretentious than a professional social worker.”
― Harry Sylvester, Dayspring

“He let his mind go, following its apparently new logic: it came to a matter of self-control, something laughed at by himself and virtually all the people he knew in the universities. He personally associated it with being a Boy Scout. In something not unlike terror, he saw how the great truths had been made banal for the popular taste; how the oversimplifying of them was a danger to himself and others dedicated to the complex and subtle. The terror became real in him as he saw for a second time, with a clarity equivalent to physical sight, how much more difficult it was for an intelligent person to be saved.”
― Harry Sylvester, Dayspring

“Pursue validation, they'll keep rejecting. Pursue excellence, validation comes chasing.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Academia doesn't pay well, unfortunately.”
― C.J. Archer

“...ha az ember Kelet-Európát tematizálja egy efféle eseményen, úgy érezheti, mintha a Holdról beszélne, azzal a különbséggel, hogy Kelet-Európa ma már senkit sem érdekel. (370-1)”
― Réka Mán-Várhegyi, Mágneshegy

“Muder first and then scholarly pursuits”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Paradox

“Knowledge is carnage, you can't have it without sacrafice”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Paradox

“I am convinced that every appearance of terms like 'metaethics,' 'deontology,' 'noncognitivism, 'anti-realism,' 'emotivism,' and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.”
― Sam Harris

“better to stare at a wall for 4 hours than to practice something leads you away from reality for 4 hours... it's better to do nothing than to learn things that are False.”
― Peter Boghossian

“Fortunately, the metamorphosis came too late to permit me to go back to graduate school. And thus I escaped indoctrination. Whatever I learned about developmental psychology and social psychology, I learned on my own. I was an outsider looking in, and that has made all the difference. I did not buy
into the assumptions of the academic establishment. I was not indebted to their granting agencies. And, once I had given up writing textbooks, I was not required to perpetuate the status quo by teaching the received gospel to a bunch of credulous college students. I gave up writing textbooks because one day it suddenly occurred to me that many of the things I had been telling those credulous college students were wrong.”
― Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

“This offhand comment made by German physicist Max Planck at the turn of the twentieth century was based on his observation that scientists are like mafiosi—they exert a stranglehold on their fields, preventing new ideas from percolating to the surface and, like Don Corleone, you had to wait for them to die in order for science to move forward.”
― Robert Lustig Dr

“The realm of academia is an educational system that prioritises conformity over curiosity, rote memorisation over critical thinking, and passive absorption over active participation.”
― Rove Monteux, What is Wrong with Society Today

“Futnak. Enikő egy francia film végére, Regina egy angol film elejére gondol. (382.)”
― Réka Mán-Várhegyi, Mágneshegy

“A folyosón Enikő az egyik diákjába, Király Robiba botlik, aki egy hónapok óta ottfelejtett asztalon ül, és fintorogva olvas egy nem olyan régen megjelent novelláskötetet. Enikő régóta ismeri Robit, a fiú évek óta látogatja a szemináriumait, még most is, pedig így heted-nyolcadéves hallgatóként már megválogatja, hogy hova tesz még be a lábát. (262.)”
― Réka Mán-Várhegyi, Mágneshegy

“Ma d'altra parte, il linguista che voglia interpretare un testo oggi deve fare i conti con la frattura che esiste tra l'archeologia e la filologia in America. Il punto di vista filologico, con il suo dotto interesse per i testi come tali, è diventato ostico e incomprensibile per l'archeologia americana moderna, altamente sviluppata scientificamente per quel che riguarda la correlazione logica di prove strettamente materiali, ma la cui popolarità e i cui finanziamenti sono strettamente connessi con interessi estetici o legati alla concretezza della sua materia, i prodotti dell'uomo, in particolare di tipo esotico.”
― Whorf Benjamin Lee 1897-1941, Language, Thought, and Reality; Selected Writings

“The celebrity professor is a new phenomenon and not a good one. In celebrity-driven academia, "getting ahead" means beating other people, which means establishing a personal reputation and denying it, to the extent possible, to rivals.”
― Harry Lewis

“Selective neutrality should be the instrument with which the university administration distinguishes those who contribute to a respectful campus climate and productive discourse and debate from those who disrupt such a climate and discriminate against various identities. It must be selective, not in the sense of being inconsistent but in the sense of defining and shaping appropriate campus norms.”
― Judea Pearl, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS

“Whatever the intentions behind land acknowledgments, I am intrigued that otherwise well-educated listeners (especially university audiences) require continuous reminders that they occupy stolen land. Settler colonialism not only erases, it feeds on its own forgetfulness.”
― Ryan Emanuel, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

“Surely she wasn't secretly a scholar?...If she'd been inclined towards research, she'd have realized it before.
The truth was, she'd simply never encountered a topic interesting enough–or dangerous enough–to engage her.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea