Harvard Quotes - Page 9

• Harvard and Yale concentrated with venture capitalists that got the best calls and brainpower. Very few firms made most of the money, and they made it in just a few periods. Everyone else returned between mediocre and lousy. When returns happened, envy rippled through institutional money management. The amount invested in venture capital went up 10 times post-1999. That later money was lost very quickly. It will happen again. I don't know anyone who successfully resists this stuff. It becomes a new orthodoxy.

  Charlie Munger

  Yale, Envy, Venture Capitalists

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• You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

  Steve Jobs

  Art, Years, Land

  "Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs". Interview With David Sheff, reprints.longform.org. February 1985.

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• Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.

  Seamus Heaney

  Home, Circles, House

  Source: harvardmagazine.com

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• If our legislature does not heartily push our University [of Virginia] we must send our children for education to Kentucky [Transylvania College] or Cambridge [Harvard College]. The latter will return them to us as fanatics and tories, the former will keep them to add to their population.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Children, College, Kentucky

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• The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

  Seamus Heaney

  Eight, Self, Years

  Source: harvardmagazine.com

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• You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?

  Paul Samuelson

  Jobs, Smart, Chance

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• When I came to Harvard, there were no tenured women except one, who was in a chair reserved for a woman. It's still an uphill battle, and I encountered great sexism in parts of my career, but I have to say that things are a lot better than they used to be. There are many women today doing wonderful work all over the academy.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Careers, Battle, Today

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line.

  Eugene O'Neill

  Years, Class, Bakers

  Eugene O'Neill, Mark W. Estrin (1990). “Conversations with Eugene O'Neill”, p.32, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• At Harvard, the strong and savvy and confident thrived, while the nice or shy or quaintly moral were just bit players. In Ysleta, you believed in God because you were poor and needed something to hold on to. At Harvard, you believed in your good luck or bad luck, in all-nighters, in your political savvy.

  Sergio Troncoso

  Strong, Nice, Good Luck

  Sergio Troncoso (2011). “From This Wicked Patch of Dust”, p.97, University of Arizona Press

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• There's an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school's president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department - his field - and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis.

  Noam Chomsky

  Block, Book, School

  Source: thehumanist.com

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• The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

  George Will

  Years, Europe, Unions

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• Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

  Seamus Heaney

  Writing, Spots, Composition

  Source: harvardmagazine.com

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• I just wanted to begin by mentioning that the nominee for secretary of the department of labor will be Mr. Alex Acosta. He has a law degree from Harvard Law School, great student. Former clerk for Justice Samuel Alito. He has had a tremendous career. He's a member and has been a member of the National Labor Relations Board and has been through Senate confirmation three times, confirmed. I have wished him the best.

  Donald Trump

  School, Law, Careers

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• Trying to make the NBA is one of the very few areas where a Harvard degree won't necessarily help.

  Jeremy Lin

  Nba, Trying, Degrees

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• One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.

  Stephen Spender

  America, Years, Two

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• Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment - and lord knows I've created a good bit of it - I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.

  Charlie Munger

  School, Ignorance, Thinking

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• To finish first you have to first finish. Don't get in a position where you go back to go. What's interesting is that some guy whose grandfather was a lawyer and a judge-hurriedly going to Harvard Law with a wave of veterans-I was willing to go into so many different businesses. I was constantly going right into the other fellow's business and doing better than the other fellow did. The reason it was possible? Self-education- developing mental discipline, big ideas that really work.

  Charlie Munger

  Law, Ideas, Self

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• I get flack for saying [when I visit a college and give a speech], "This is a nice college, but the really great educator is McDonald's." They hate me for saying this and think I'm a slimy creature. But McDonald's hires people with bad work habits, trains them, and teaches them to come to work on time and have good work habits. I think a lot of what goes on there is better than at Harvard.

  Charlie Munger

  Nice, Hate, College

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• It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Boston, President, Realizing

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• One of the ways to be happy, to be truly happy, is to contribute to a cause that is greater than yourself. And, through Harvard-based research, we can see that happy people live longer.

  Sheryl WuDunn

  People, Research, Way

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• I am not some preaching farmer with a book under my arm; I am a graduate of Harvard College.

  Samuel Parris

  Book, College, Arms

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• 9/11 was my first day teaching at Harvard University. My classes were all canceled and I got back to town two days later. I'm one of those people who doesn't think the world has changed any at all since 9/11. It just seemed to be almost inevitable, something like that. That's one of the reasons why the backstory of Fay Grim goes all the way back into the '80s. I was trying to sketch out the continuity of all this hanky-panky between the security agencies of the world.

  Hal Hartley

  Teaching, Thinking, Agency

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• Three years in jail is a good corrective for three years at Harvard.

  Alger Hiss

  Years, Jail, Three

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• Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.

  Louis Menand

  Years, Careers, Ideas

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• The problem is that many times people suspend their common sense because they get drowned in business models and Harvard business school teachings.

  Mo Ibrahim

  Teaching, School, People

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