Academic Stagnation Quotes

Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days do for a lifetime.

The French higher education system has not adapted to this revolutionary period. [It] rewards people for their capacity to follow the path that is open to them. It does not encourage people to rebel or to develop their character.

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba, and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.

[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.