Robert Darnton Quotes

The Wellcome Foundation offered me the chance to establish a small academic research unit, modestly funded, but with total independence. The real opportunity, however, came from King's College, London.

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

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

Both my wife and I went to Harvard, and it's incredibly exciting that our son and daughter are going there and have the chance to experience it. There are many awesome opportunities at Harvard. That's one of its greatest frustrations - not having enough time to take the classes you want to take.

Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.

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

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

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.

I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.

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

For every dollar we have given to athletics, we have given about 27 to higher education or medical research.

I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society.

After World War II, scientific research in the U.S. was well supported. In the 1960s, when I came to America, the sky was the limit, and this conducive atmosphere enabled many of us to pursue esoteric research that resulted in America winning the lion's share of Nobel Prizes.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Indeed, we are privileged to have been afforded the opportunity to study Nature and to follow our own thoughts and inspirations in a time of relative tranquillity and in a land with a generous and forward-looking government.

The Nobel prize is unquestionably the most famous prize in the world, and very often, the prize is an object of prestige not only for a person but also for a research center, a country, or for a particular area of interest.

If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments.

A truly great university is a nucleus of artistic expression. It fosters creative, critical thought, and serves as a platform for civil discourse.

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.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

One must not put manacles upon science.

Taxpayers, lawmakers and donors need to wake from the spell cast by American universities’ past glory. Only then can they summon the courage to withdraw funding and force the necessary change: replacing faux-academic political activists with real academic thinkers—people who care about original thought, not peddling an ideology.