Quotations on Academics

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
- Attributed to W. H. Auden (1907 - 1973), British poet.

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads...
- W. B. Yeats (1865 - 1939), Irish poet and playwright.
The Wild Swans at Coole, "The Scholars"

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
- Noam Chomsky, U.S. linguist and political activist.Used by Chomsky to demonstrate that an utterance can be grammatical without having meaning.
Syntactic Structures

In America for a man to become a university professor means that he is too early removed from the necessity of making good on his own among equals.
- Mary Austin (1868 - 1934), U.S. novelist.Referring to President Woodrow Wilson, formerly a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton.
Letter to H. G. Wells

It is not in the power of professors of demonstrative sciences to change their opinions at pleasure, and adopt first one side and then the other.
- Galileo (1564 - 1642), Italian scientist.
Letter to Cristina di Lorena, Grandduchess of Tuscany

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.
- John Littlewood (1885 - 1977), British mathematician.
A Mathematician's Miscellany

There was no light nonsense about Miss Blimber...she was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead—stone dead—and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul.
- Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), British novelist.
Dombey and Son

They will review a book by a writer much older than themselves as if it were an over-ambitious essay by a second-year student...It is the little dons I complain about, like so many corgis trotting up, hoping to nip your ankles.
- J. B. Priestley (1894 - 1984), British writer.
Outcries and Asides

We landed outside the university, where the dons, whose arguments had so thickly populated the ether that they had seen neither sun nor rain for the past five years.
- Jeanette Winterson (1959 - ), British novelist.
Sexing the Cherry