Academic Skepticism Quotes

I have to admit that he was not bad at combinatorial analysis - a branch, however, that even then I considered to be dried up.

College professors are suspect because whenever emotion is in control, anti-intellectualism prevails.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong.

Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

I'm even stunned at some of the majors you can get in college these days. Like you can major in the mating habits of the Australian rabbit bat, major in leisure studies... Okay, get a journalism major. Okay, education major, journalism major. Right. Philosophy major, right. Archeology major. I don't know, whatever it is. Major in ballroom dance, of course. It doesn't replace work. How about a major in film studies? How about a major in black studies? How about a major in women studies? How about a major in home ec? Oops, sorry! No such thing.

Of all the climatologists whose careers depend on the climate changing to keep themselves publishing articles — yes, I could read that, but I don't believe it.

So far there has been little discussion among gender scholars about the need to engage with skeptics. They tend to view skeptics and dissenters as cranks.

Today the most effective way to disabuse a student of the idea that he can know truth is to send him to an elite college.

You scholars, you're in communication with the devil.

To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.

Every man should have a college education in order to show him how little the thing is really worth.

I probably dreamt about running off to America or something when I was 16 because it just seemed like I was studying algebra and going, 'What am I going to use this for?'