Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Knowledge was scattered treasure, education organized it into art, commerce and science.

— Amit Kalantri

Life is not only about acquiring knowledge, it is about applying knowledge.

— Amit Kalantri

Make your education valuable. Apply what you learned. Refuse to take the back seat and watch things happen. Join the change and be part of the change.

— Israelmore Ayivor

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.

— Daniel Amory

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life tenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses — especially the older ones — functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in Gen Pop.

— Jincy Willett

PISA was developed by a kind of think tank for the developed world, called the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the scientist at the center of the experiment was Andreas Schneider.

— Amanda Ripley

Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.

— Peter Gray

The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics, economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.

— Osamu Dazai

The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it—they are powerless to deny it while still claiming to be rational. In principle, it is the ideas themselves that are, as we say, compelling, but their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation (“Clearly. . .”), threat (“It would be unscientific to. . .”), authority (“As Popper showed. . .”), insult (“This work lacks the necessary rigor for. . .”), and belittling (“Few people today seriously believe that. . .”). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrote that “college football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students.

— Steven Pinker