Academics Quotes

“They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.”

“They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.”

“Andrew Ross makes sense of this sad artifice [decreasing academic pay] by explaining that academics of all ranks, along with artists, are uniquely willing to tolerate exploitation in the workplace. Ross claims that scholars' readiness "to accept a discounted wage out of 'love for their subject' has helped not only to sustain the cheap labor supply but also to magnify its strength and volume. Like artists and performers, academics are inclined by training to sacrifice earnings for the opportunity to exercise their craft." (p. 64)”

“Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.”

“I have never compromised on academics and the one thing that I insist on is good grades, even though I am a relaxed and indulgent parent in most other things.”

“Bit of a limp conclusion if you ask me,” Osric growled. “You academics are always so timid with your words. Your conclusion sounds like a different form of the question.” “And so it is, Osric,” Fergal said with a chuckle. “Slightly whittled, sharper, but it is still a question. In time it will be sharp enough to impale the answer.”

“I'm not one of those academics that don't do shit but reads about it. The difference is, I do shit. I have a proof of concept and it works.”

“Academic life is but half life it is a withdrawal from the fight to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister.”

“There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope.”

“It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.”

“Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators”