College Quotes

If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside my resentment, dropped my defenses. I might have a basic understanding of European history or economics. More abstractly, I might feel I had truly been somewhere, open and porous and hungry to learn. Because being a student was an enviable identity and one I can only reclaim by attending community college late in life for a bookmaking class or something.

~ Lena Dunham

The message for all students should be: Put down the bong and get to work, because the number of curious, eager-to-learn peers around the world with the means and ambition to get a great college education is about to increase a thousandfold.

~ Kevin Carey

This is the generation that thinks of itself as global citizens but knows little about the world and acts locally. It is the most diverse generation in collegiate history with the strongest relationships between races but they have limited interest in talking about race or reaching across political or generational divides.

~ Arthur Levine

Borrow money only for an education that will yield enough of a return in the job market to allow you to pay your loans back.

~ Kevin Carey

Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.

~ William Deresiewicz

Unbeknownst to me, from the beginning of freshman year Rob and Oswaldo had been drawn away from Yale via their friends on the dining hall and custodial staffs, outward into the city of New Haven. Rob considered these excursions a much-needed dose of reality, the social equivalent of an antidepressant.

~ Jeff Hobbs

The word fronting was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around.

~ Jeff Hobbs

Despite all the challenges facing higher education in America, from mounting student debt to grade inflation and erratic standards, our system is rightly the world's envy, and not just because our most revered universities remain on the cutting edge of research and attract talent from around the globe. We also have a plenitude and variety of settings for learning that are unrivaled. In light of that, the process of applying to college should and could be about ecstatically rummaging through those possibilities and feeling energized, even elated, by them. But for too many students, it's not, and financial constraints aren't the only reason. Failures of boldness and imagination by both students and parents bear some blame. The information is all out there. You just have to look.

~ Frank Bruni

The colleges and other institutions of learning are going too far, in my opinion. I think 50% of those attending educational institutions, having the professions in view, would be better off with a common school education that would enable them to earn a living, rather than sit around in offices and wait for clients. W.A. Clark (MT Senator, 1901-1907)

~ Bill Dedman

We care (about prison education), very simply, because (prisoners) get out. Almost everyone who is locked up now is going to be set free one day. If we treat prisoners like animals the whole time they are locked up, that's what we'll get when they're back on the streets: wild, dangerous animals.

~ Christopher Zoukis

I stayed with him for three days, and he then asked: ‘Do you know any craft by which to make your living?’ I told him: ‘I am a lawyer, a scientist, a scribe, a mathematician and a calligrapher.’ ‘There is no market for that kind of thing here,’ he replied. ‘No one in this city has any knowledge of science or of writing and their only concern is making money.’ ‘By God,’ I said, ‘I know nothing apart from what I have told you.

~ Anonymous

College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.

~ Stephen King

He doesn’t want to step out of the present, this present. Because once he does, there will be college applications and college acceptances (just one will do) and the last of everything (last class, last party, last night, last day, last goodbye), and then the world will change forever and he will go to college and eventually become an adult. That is not what he wants. He does not want those complications, that change. Not now.

~ David Levithan

One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.

~ Denis Diderot

if you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel (for example, given the antipathy to Israel on campuses, a trip to Israel would be both morally clarifying and maturing). The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values.

~ Dennis Prager

One thing they do not teach you in college is what you will actually be doing in a career of your choosing.

~ Joanie Connell

Campuses are bubbles, artificial environments that insulate students from the life of the competitive marketplace. The more exact truth is that our campuses offer students the privileges of liberty without the corresponding responsibilities.

~ Peter Augustine Lawler

The faces of your young people in general are not interesting—I don't mean the children, but the young men and women—and they are awkward and clownish in their manners, without the quaintness of the elder generation, who are the funniest old dears in the world. They will all be quaint enough as they get older. You must remember the sort of life they lead. They get their notions very slowly, and they must have notions in their heads before they can show them on their faces.

~ Thomas Hughes

College towns [are] all the same in that way; same burger, different wrapper.

~ Sheri Webber

You see, at Rugby I was rather a great man. There one had a share in the ruling of 300 boys, and a good deal of responsibility; but here one has only just to take care of oneself, and keep out of scrapes; and that's what I never could do.

~ Thomas Hughes

I don’t understand why Universities only offer undergraduate classes during the day when their professional staff should be smart enough to know that a large percentage of their students are non-traditional.

~ Heather Chapple

Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

~ Andrew Delbanco

Of course he had a female following. Was there anything college girls found sexier than being told what to think?

~ Mira Jacob

I thought i had been educated well enough until i left college.

~ Paul Bamikole

Did he talk about silos?”“Of course he did,” I said. “We have to break down the silos that separate the academic side of the house from the Student Retention Office, apparently.”Emma wrinkled her nose. “Why is it a good thing to break silos? All that happens when you break a silo is that the grain spills out. Or the missile falls over.

~ Frankie Bow

A month into the semester, I would start showing up twenty minutes late to class again. The rewards weren't enough to keep me on task, and life got in the way. My mind wandered to the future, postcollege, when I'd create my own schedule that served my need to eat a rich snack every five to fifteen minutes. As for the disappointment written across the teacher's face? I couldn't, and wouldn't, care.

~ Lena Dunham

What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self).

~ David Brooks

When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: All human beings by nature desire to know.

~ Matthew B. Crawford

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

~ Ray Bradbury

When describing the University of Virginia: Here, We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.

~ D.h. Lawrence

Jefferson and Washington had no idea these idiots would exist, otherwise they would not have made killing illegal.

~ Anonymous

AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto—the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults.

~ Chad Harbach

Jaxon snorted in disbelief. He cupped his sac just to make sure his balls and dick were still there. If he hadn’t been so content in his life he would’ve thought he was growing a vagina.

~ Senayda Pierre

It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein’s contribution to the field was reformulative and second-tier.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

~ John Cage

What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!

~ Margaret Atwood

What I want to get out of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of living life and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and help other people and myself.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Carmyn drops her glass from her lips first and bites into the slice of lime she's holding in her other hand. Her lips wrap around the flesh of the fruit, and my dick flexes in earnest. I've watched women suck on me and not look nearly that seductive.

~ Angeline Kace