Thomas Guthrie Quotes

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

Minds ripen at very different ages.

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.

As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.

I have discovered that just because we grow weaker physically as we age, it doesn't mean that we must grow weaker spiritually.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

The completion of my undergraduate training at the University of California (Berkeley) provided just the needed touches of rigor at advanced levels in both economics and mathematics.

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

In the Sanghi family, there is no one who has undertaken intellectual pursuits.

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

The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult.

I had been, to the age of 25, a bookworm.

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.

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

I've been in and out of academia ever since I was young.

I was never going to be a scholar.

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

Whatever subject I choose, I do a PhD in it.

Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.

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 don't believe athletes should be role models. . . . We're a one-shot deal, one in a million, so we should be the least likely role models. . . . I think one of the problems in society today is that we don't stress education enough, because we glorify athletes, actors and actresses.

You are a man still young, so to say, in your first youth and so put intellect above everything.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.