Anything in parentheses can be ignored.
-- Seeger's Law
Anything in parentheses can be ignored.
-- Seeger's Law
A definition of teaching: casting fake pearls before real swine.
-- Bill Cain, "Stand Up Tragedy"
Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my
teacher was in my class for five years.
-- George Burns
What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a
free meandering brook.
-- Henry David Thoreau
British education is probably the best in the world, if you can survive
it. If you can't there is nothing left for you but the diplomatic corps.
-- Peter Ustinov
Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead
to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters
of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with
royal-blue chickens.
-- Fran Lebowitz, "Social Studies"
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first
thought of.
-- Burt Bacharach
I came out of twelve years of college and I didn't even know how to sew.
All I could do was account -- I couldn't even account for myself.
-- Firesign Theatre
Joe Cool always spends the first two weeks at college sailing his frisbee.
-- Snoopy
A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened
into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the
hope of greening the landscape of idea.
-- John Ciardi
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper
is from the wrong kind of tree.
-- Professor, EECS, George Washington University
I'm looking forward to working with you on this next year.
-- Professor, Harvard, on a senior thesis.
“A University without students is like an ointment without a fly.”
-- Ed Nather, professor of astronomy at UT Austin
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
-- Benjamin Franklin
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get
the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in
college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural
method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall
learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should
be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the
young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits.
I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not
by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise
instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the
attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools,
not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to
put on a professor.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Briefly stated, the findings are that when presented with an array of
data or a sequence of events in which they are instructed to discover
an underlying order, subjects show strong tendencies to perceive order
and causality in random arrays, to perceive a pattern or correlation
which seems a priori intuitively correct even when the actual correlation
in the data is counterintuitive, to jump to conclusions about the correct
hypothesis, to seek and to use only positive or confirmatory evidence, to
construe evidence liberally as confirmatory, to fail to generate or to
assess alternative hypotheses, and having thus managed to expose themselves
only to confirmatory instances, to be fallaciously confident of the validity
of their judgments (Jahoda, 1969; Einhorn and Hogarth, 1978). In the
analyzing of past events, these tendencies are exacerbated by failure to
appreciate the pitfalls of post hoc analyses.
-- A. Benjamin
A reader reports that when the patient died, the attending doctor
recorded the following on the patient's chart: "Patient failed to fulfill
his wellness potential."
Another doctor reports that in a recent issue of the *American Journal
of Family Practice* fleas were called "hematophagous arthropod vectors."
A reader reports that the Army calls them "vertically deployed anti-
personnel devices." You probably call them bombs.
At McClellan Air Force base in Sacramento, California, civilian
mechanics were placed on "non-duty, non-pay status." That is, they were fired.
After taking the trip of a lifetime, our reader sent his twelve rolls
of film to Kodak for developing (or "processing," as Kodak likes to call it)
only to receive the following notice: "We must report that during the handling
of your twelve 35mm Kodachrome slide orders, the films were involved in an
unusual laboratory experience." The use of the passive is a particularly nice
touch, don't you think? Nobody did anything to the films; they just had a bad
experience. Of course our reader can always go back to Tibet and take his
pictures all over again, using the twelve replacement rolls Kodak so generously
sent him.
-- Quarterly Review of Doublespeak (NCTE)
Higher education helps your earning capacity. Ask any college professor.
The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious
seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the
unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more
bounteous harvest of gobbledegook than the rest of the world put together.
-- Sir Peter Medawar
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics,
because the stakes are so low.
-- Wallace Sayre
As Gen. de Gaulle occassionally acknowledges America to be the daughter
of Europe, so I am pleased to come to Yale, the daughter of Harvard.
-- J.F. Kennedy
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and
art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- G. B. Shaw
Experience is the worst teacher. It always gives the test first and
the instruction afterward.
About all some men accomplish in life is to send a son to Harvard.
“We're running out of adjectives to describe our situation. We
had crisis, then we went into chaos, and now what do we call this?” said
Nicaraguan economist Francisco Mayorga, who holds a doctorate from Yale.
-- The Washington Post, February, 1988
The New Yorker's comment:
At Harvard they'd call it a noun.
I heard a definition of an intellectual, that I thought was very interesting:
a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Academicians care, that's who.
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?
-- Lily Tomlin
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest
in students.
-- John Ciardi
The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an
open doorway with an open mind.
-- E.B. White