I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Explorer
Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
This place is the Devil, or at least his principal residence, they call it the University, but any other appellation would have suited it much better, for study is the last pursuit of the society; the Master eats, drinks, and sleeps, the Fellows drink, dispute and pun, the employments of the undergraduates you will probably conjecture without my description.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
Remote and ineffectual don.
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic
If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
College-bred is a four-year loaf, using dad’s dough, Coming out half-baked, with a lot of crust.
—Unknown
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
—Unknown
‘Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.
—William Congreve (1670–1729) English Playwright, Poet
College isn’t the place to go for ideas.
—Helen Keller (1880–1968) American Author
Towery city and branching between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) British Jesuit Priest, Poet
Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.
—Unknown
It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
—Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) British Essayist, Caricaturist, Novelist
They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
—John Ciardi (1916–86) American Poet, Teacher, Etymologist, Translator
A college is a place where pebbles are polished and diamonds dimmed.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic
While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.
—Ray Kroc (1902–84) American Entrepreneur, Businessperson
I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.
—Thomas Merton (1915–68) American Trappist Monk
Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
—Sylvia Plath (1932–63) American Poet, Novelist
To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.
—Hannah Arendt (1906–75) German-American Philosopher, Political Theorist
Within the university… you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It’s perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.
—Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
The men—the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.
—Unknown
The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Oxford is—Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
—E. M. Forster (1879–1970) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.
—E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British Politician, Political leader
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic