Scholarly Inquiry Quotes

The essence of a university is free and open inquiry, and when it loses that it is no longer a university.

Heritage will remain, first and foremost, a research institute dedicated to impeccable research and data-driven policy analysis.

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 scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.” Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.

It's not research if you're really interested in what you're reading.

A universityeducates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.

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.

Knowledge pursued for its own sake - that's the definition of education, as opposed to training.

Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.

Research is one of the Nation's very greatest resources and the role of the Federal Government in supporting and stimulating it needs to reexamined.

I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.

I thought research would be more glamorous, somehow. I'd give the librarian a secret code word and he'd give me the one book I needed and whisper the necessary page numbers. Like a speakeasy. With books.

Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.

I think serious research tends to be associated with higher academic quality, more prestige, more resources, and even, heaven help us, better teaching, to a greater extent than you might think. Folks who don't have an active intellectual life become, though the long years of just teaching, less intellectually alive and exciting.

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

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

The real University... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.

The pursuit of science, the study of the great works, the value of free inquiry, in short, the very idea of living the life of the mind - yes, these formative and abiding principles of higher education in America had their first and firmest advocate, and their greatest embodiment, in a tall, fair-headed, friendly man who watched this university take form from the mountainside where he lived, the university whose founding he called a crowning achievement to along and well-spent life.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

All my knowledge comes from research.

Of all our studies, it is history that is best qualified to reward our research.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.