Quotations about College

Academe, n.:  An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.  Academy, n.:  A modern school where football is taught.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.  ~John Ciardi


Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities:  the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.  ~Abbott Lawrence Lowell


A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.  ~Theodore Roosevelt


If you have a college degree you can be absolutely sure of one thing... you have a college degree.  ~Author Unknown


If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.  ~Robert Goheen, Time, 23 June 1961


It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.  ~Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun, 1951

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.  ~W.H. Auden

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.  ~Russell Green

A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D.  Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B.  ~"Fats" Domino


Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or they didn't.  ~L.L. Hendren

College is the best time of your life.  When else are your parents going to spend several thousand dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?  ~David Wood

A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.  ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


Does college pay?  They do if you are a good open-field runner.  ~Will Rogers

A college education shows a man how little other people know.  ~Thomas Chandler Haliburton

The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.  ~J. Frank Dobie


I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's.  ~Alex Karras

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.  ~Sydney J. Harris


College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.  ~Elbert Hubbard


College is a place to keep warm between high school and an early marriage.  ~George Gobel

A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job.  ~Caroline Bird


I learned three important things in college - to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes.  ~Agnes DeMille, Dance to the Piper, 1952

The new appears as a minority point of view, and hence is unpopular.  The function of a university is to give it a sanctuary.  ~Martin H. Fischer

I have a degree in liberal arts.  Do you want fries with that?  ~Author unknown, as seen on a T-shirt


Hitler destroyed the German university with design; we destroyed ours without.  ~Martin H. Fischer

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.  ~J. Robert Oppenheimer

The purpose of primary education is the development of your weak characteristics; the purpose of university education, the development of your strong.  ~Nevin Fenneman

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments.  Of course they graduate the best - it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country.  They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money - provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.  ~Peter DeVries

Standardization is the fertilizer of college education.  A little may be useful, but flowers do not grow in pure manure.  ~Martin H. Fischer

The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.  ~Author Unknown


The elective system offered a bewildering freedom of choice, leaving some graduates with the impression that they had nibbled at dozens of canapés of knowledge and never had their fill.  ~Ted Morgan


The quality of a university is measured more by the kind of student it turns out than the kind it takes in.  ~Robert J. Kibbee


A place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

A university is a college with a stadium seating over 40,000.  ~Leonard L. Levinson