Scholarly Research Quotes

Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.

I am an academic, and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas.

I study all the greats.

I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff.

My dad was an English professor.

I have taught history on the high school and college levels, and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian, The National Institutes of Health, and numerous colleges and universities, mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.

“Google” is not a synonym for “research.”

Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

I'm an academic. I teach at the university, and that's where I will go back to.

Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.

I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week... there's not much room for novels.

I had been a college teacher. I had taught Greek mythology.

Henry Louis Gates is such a wealth of knowledge in himself.

I read kind of serious books about fairly arcane subjects.

I really am a very research-oriented writer.

Besides numerous science courses, I had the opportunity to study philosophy, the history of architecture, economics, and Russian history in courses taught by extraordinarily knowledgeable professors.

Academic scientists aren't generally interested in books for the public. So when one comes out, the authors can't expect much praise from scientists. My goal both as a singer and an instructor is to educate through provocation and entertainment.

I don't fall into the physical manifestation of a man of letters. So I guess people assume the scripts are delivered to me under the door.

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

Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it.

Environmental history was . . . born out of a moral purpose, with strong political commitments behind it, but also became, as it matured, a scholarly enterprise that had neither any simple, nor any single, moral or political agenda to promote. Its principal goal became one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected that environment and with what results.

After attending the gymnasium between my eighth and seventeenth years, I studied classical philology at Berlin University for two years under Boeckh and Lachmann, and with the friendly support of Emanuel Geibel and Franz Kugler, I dabbled in all sorts of poetry.

By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.