H. L. Mencken Quotes

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

Every summer, I regret that I didn't become a college teacher. Such a sweet life! With all that vacation time! You'll never get me to believe that being a tenured professor at a good college is anything but Heaven on earth.

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

At the end of the day, I'm a very boring academic, bogged down with academia and structure and delivering an education.

My father, Emil Palade, was professor of philosophy, and my mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was a teacher. The family environment explains why I acquired early in life great respect for books, scholars and education.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

I was a trial lawyer. At the same time, I was a teacher. I taught about the political and social content of film for American University. Then I left and became a teacher at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I taught about the political and social content of film, but I also taught a course in law for undergraduates.

Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

I definitely felt by the time I got to grad school - which was a great experience - I was like, 'What's the difference between the teachers and the students? Why are the teachers teachers if they want to be acting?' It didn't make sense to me anymore. It's not like you learn how to set a broken bone and you get the stamp of approval.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

I became an academic so that I could share my knowledge and experience with students.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

A rational system and order for educational administration should be established on the principle of ensuring smooth progress of teaching and scientific research by teachers and researchers, and of edification of students.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.

I ended up going to Harvard College, which was about as likely in my neighborhood as going to the moon.

For every job you require a kind of mindset. To be a teacher one should be knowledgeable. To be a software engineer you should know computer data system analysis, computer language etc. So, my mindset is not aligned with politics.

When you take the best of universities in the world, all of them have research and education contiguous; the person who teaches you could be a Nobel laureate. Some subjects are at the tri-junction of many subjects put together.

I don't think any of my teachers know much about football. Pretty much every teacher I have is foreign, and UCLA's a brilliant mix of minds from all over the world.