American Universities Quotes

• I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world

  Clifford Geertz

  Thinking, World, Being The Best

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• I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

  Susan Sontag

  Thinking, Vacuums, Study

  Source: ctheory.net

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• We are in the presence of a recruiting drive systematically and deliberately undertaken by American business, by American universities, and to a lesser extent, American government, often initiated by talent scouts specially sent over here to buy British brains and preempt them for service of the U.S.A. ... I look forward earnestly to the day when some reform of the American system of school education enables them to produce their own scientists so that, in an aimiable free trade of talent, there may be adequate interchange between our country and theirs, and not a one-way traffic.

  Lord Hailsham

  Country, School, Science

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• I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.

  Thomas Piketty

  Way, University, Organized

  "'Marx? I never really managed to read it' – an interview with Thomas Piketty". Interview with Isaac Chotiner, www.newstatesman.com. May 6, 2014.

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• Kennedy was significantly different than Eisenhower before him, and different from Johnson after him. So those three years were the beginning of a détente with the Soviet Union, a new feeling for peace, a seeking out of a new ally with the Soviet Union - the end of the Cold War, as Kennedy called it in his American University speech.

  Oliver Stone

  War, Years, Feelings

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The heads of leading American universities say that if they selected applicants based on grades alone, their student bodies would be 100 percent Asian.

  Paul Achleitner

  Would Be, Body, Asian

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Blue, Literature, Today

  Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Sinclair Lewis (1931). “Why Sinclair Lewis got the Nobel prize”

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• There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture.

  Charlie Munger

  Teaching, People, Bigs

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• I was a trial lawyer. At the same time, I was a teacher. I taught about the political and social content of film for American University. Then I left and became a teacher at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I taught about the political and social content of film, but I also taught a course in law for undergraduates.

  Ben Stein

  Teacher, Law, California

  The Onion interview, www.avclub.com. January 27, 1999.

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• I used to ask myself why American universities are financed through endowments. Now I know: During the early days of America, the state was poor and when citizens wanted to set something up, they needed to collect money themselves. Historically, this was different in Europe. There used to be a strong state, a monarch or a king. He provided money.

  Zhang Xin

  Strong, Kings, Europe

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• If you don't have to pay for everything you're providing, why in the world should you cut the cost of it, when it's gonna be covered? That's what's happened to the health care system. Why cut costs when somebody's gonna subsidize whatever you charge. But there's another reason why tuitions are never gonna come down on major American universities, and that's because they are the training ground of American liberalism and radicalism. And they have to make jobs there attractive to the professors and the teachers who are gonna indoctrinate these young skulls full of mush.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Teacher, Jobs, Cutting

  "The Pope: Trump’s Not a Christian". "The Rush Limbaugh Show", www.rushlimbaugh.com. February 18, 2016.

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• It's no surprise that at the same time that American universities have engaged in a serious commitment to diversity, they have been thought-prisons. We are not talking about diversity in any real way. We are talking about brown, black, white versions of the same political ideology.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Real, Commitment, White

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Korea, Cuba, Lasts

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• American university presidents are a nervous breed; I have never thought well of them as a class.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Class, President, Nervous

  "The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter 2, p. 60, 1977.

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• Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  People, University, Department

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

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• But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete." (John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963, American University speech)

  John F. Kennedy

  Peace, June, Cities

  Kennedy, John F. (1964). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963”, p.464, Best Books on

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• And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights -- the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation – the right to breathe air as nature provided it -- the right of future generations to a healthy existence?" (John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963, American University speech)

  John F. Kennedy

  Peace, June, Rights

  Kennedy, John F. (1964). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963”, p.464, Best Books on

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• I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia

  Julian Bond

  Virginia, Teach, University

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• What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists - all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few 'conservatives'.

  Grover Furr

  Fighting, Racism, Needs

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• American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.

  Camille Paglia

  Reality, College, Style

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.120, Vintage

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• American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

  Edward Albee

  Inspirational, Education, Half

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• You know there are very few Marxists left in the world... they're all in American universities.

  Milton Friedman

  America, World, Economic

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• Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

  Jane Jacobs

  University, Primaries

  Jane Jacobs (2007). “Dark Age Ahead”, p.44, Vintage

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• It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

  Johan Huizinga

  Goal, Brain, Republic

  Johan Huizinga (1972). “America; a Dutch historian's vision, from afar and near”

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• I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Sleep, Organization

  "Philip Larkin's Everyday Poetry" by Henry Allen, www.washingtonpost.com. June 3, 1989.

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