academics

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, 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 GenPop.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to __erious_ courses replete with __rends _ and __chools _ and __yths _ and __ymbols _ and __ocial comment _ and something unspeakably spooky called __limate of thought._ Actually these __erious_ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.

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

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.

As cliché as it might sound, I'd rather lose than win by cheating. The latter is a much deeper, more personal loss in that one is admittedly whispering to himself his lack of competence. His cheating then begets more cheating, as he is ever-privately, ever-subconsciously insulting himself; thus, gradually deteriorating any remaining confidence.

Schooling that children are forced to endure__n which the subject matter is imposed by others and the __earning_ is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children__ true interests__urns 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__ natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.

Have you noticed how the cleverest people at school are not those who make it in life?People who are conventionally clever get jobs on their qualifications (the past), not on their desire to succeed (the future).Very simply, they get overtaken by those who continually strive to be better than they are.

If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.

being genius does not necessarily means knowing it all or having the highest academic qualification but a persons ability to apply wisdom and common sense to common things in a distinctive manner and courageously exhibiting the latent deft to the admiration of the masses

If only we were all better educated. If then, higher education would at last be a journey for skill and knowledge rather than for power and status.

The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it__hey 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 (__learly ._._._), threat (__t would be unscientific to ._._._), authority (__s Popper showed ._._._), insult (__his work lacks the necessary rigor for ._._._), and belittling (__ew people today seriously believe that ._._._). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrote that __ollege football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students.

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. __hat__ the point?_ he said. __ids aren__ getting jobs._ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.

There's no crying in the rank book.

To be a scholar study math, to be a smart study magic.

There__ no logical connection between being smart and having money.

I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it.

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.