Academic Life Quotations

In the summer of 1965 I was invited to join Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio and returned to academic life as professor with the added responsibility of becoming also Department Chairman.

You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.

Hell! there ain't no rules around here! We are tryin' to accomplish somep'n!

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

A scientist is a mimosa when he himself has made a mistake, and a roaring lion when he discovers a mistake of others.

In academic life you seek to state absolute truths; in politics you seek to accommodate truth to the facts around you.

One of those disturbing tendencies in academic life is that there is a desire on the part of many in the name of open-mindedness to fall into a kind of relativistic denialism in which all positions are equally legitimate, all positions must be respected, and compromise must be entered into no matter what the starting point or reasonableness of the two parties.