Akira Suzuki Quotes

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.

Professorship is not a career, but rather a life's pursuit. The people with whom I work daily exemplify and remind me of this promise.

I'm an ambitious person, and Harvard makes me feel successful, just having gotten in here. That's the ugly side of why I'm proud of being at Harvard Law School. Another reason is because there's a spirit of serious intellectual endeavor here.

I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.

The quality of research in the U.S. is absolutely the best.

Getting elected to the National Academy of Sciences is the ultimate peer recognition.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

The rule with my mom was that the only way that I could be an actress when I was young was that I continued to go to public school and get straight A's in all my classes.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

I went to a very academically competitive high school. So I was always quite studious and quiet, just to keep up with the other geniuses who were in my school.

There are just two things you can do to win a Nobel prize - have a good idea and pursue it effectively.

As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.

I was a D student in high school and on the dean's list in college.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

I stood as well as any in my class, but the test of scholarship at that day was contemptible

Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.

If I came home with a grade of A, my father would say, 'There must have been a lot of dummies in that class.'

I was an engineering student and spent a lot of time in the library, and no one applauds when you finish your calculations.

I was raised by a single mother, and she felt the Japanese education system, albeit wonderful, keeps you in a certain range. You have to be better than this level but below this level.

Americans don't realize how difficult it is to create a Harvard.

It was becoming clear that, from being at the top at Holy Cross, we were at the bottom at St. Peter's. Objectively, this was very good, for it offered us a challenge and an opportunity to grow if we were ready to take it; and we surely were.

I was quite nerdy at school. I skipped a year and won a scholarship in chemistry.

I'm a child of academics.

Harvard is the home of American ideas.

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