Will Self Quotes

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

In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

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.

A university is a place that is established and will function for the benefit of society provided it is a center of independent thought.

Universities are the temple through which alone lies the road to that of Liberty.

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

All so-called "higher" education, with the exception of medicine and the technical sciences leading to production, are Luxuries, not Necessaries.

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

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy.

I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to pay their way. It's like a monastery in a way, and that beautiful refuge has been destroyed by dogma about what this stuff is for.

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

I feel lucky in that I don't really have to go to college to study something job-specific. I just want to go to learn about what is interesting to me and learn about the classes that you don't really get to take in high school because you have to take the basics.

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.

I have not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgement, accept a degree he cannot read.

One of my main reasons for going to college is to try to get a liberal arts background.

The essence of Vanderbilt is still learning, the essence of its outlook is still liberty, and liberty and learning will be and must be the touchstones of Vanderbilt University and of any free university in this country or the world. I say two touchstones, yet they are almost inseparable, inseparable if not indistinguishable, for liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.

I went to a liberal arts college wherein grading was qualitative and we had to write our own evaluations.

I am an academic, and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas.

The most important thing you can do for yourself is get an education. Learn, listen, and respond. You have to study and practice to get better at your craft and to widen your skill set.

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.

I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.

I had an excellent Ivy League education, and it gave me a long view of things.