Academic Research Quotes

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

An important impression was my father's one Sabbatical year, spent in England and Europe in 1937.

College was a wonderful time to really explore my interests. I ended up writing my senior thesis about gender inequality in the developing world.

South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century.

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university.

It has been a privilege to pursue knowledge for its own sake and to see how it might help mankind in more practical ways.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

I've spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I'm an academic. Being an academic means I don't wield power over person, place or thing. I don't command armies; I don't lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought.

I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.

While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals.

Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

For proponents of ecosystem-based management,the good news is that another new book, Ecosystem-based Management for the Oceans, conveys the topic at its state-of-the-art level of development...both Marine Ecosystems and Global Change and Ecosystem-based Management for the Oceans are valuable troves that could profitably be mined, and any academic bookshelf would wear them well.

I was a Ph.D. student at a very reputable university, I was a Harvard research associate at one of the world's premier leadership institutions.

On completing my degree, I started a Ph.D. in statistics, although I knew very little about the topic. My supervisor was Professor Harry Pitt, who was an excellent pure mathematician and probabilist.

(The discovery of penicillin) was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem.

There's a big difference between the role of an academic and the role of someone in government. That's a cliche, but in academic life if you say things that are common sense and people nod their heads, it's not very useful. You're not adding anything.

For 'Boxers & Saints,' I started by reading a couple of articles on the Internet, then writing a really rough outline, then getting more hardcore into the research. I went to a university library once a week for a year, year and a half.

I look at films every day. I study. I coach.

Learned researches lead to headaches, constipation, and befuddled quarreling.

For people familiar with Eastern Europe, Marci Shore's 'The Taste of Ashes' is, in spite of its subject matter, delicious. A professor at Yale with much experience in Eastern Europe, she writes with great sureness of touch, weaving personal recollections with intellectual commentary and ideas with emotions, including her own.

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist…. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing

I was a professor at Princeton University. And, in that capacity, I studied for many years the role of financial crisis in the economy.