Top 100 Professors Quotes

You can learn from everyone, the president or the cleaner. You need teachers in life, but they’re not always school teachers or professors. You learn from ordinary people. You learn from travel, from just walking down the street.

Stoicism – and philosophy – are not the domains of idle professors. They are the succor of the successful and the men and women of action.

I travelled round the world giving demonstrations of my talents. In every country, I performed for students, professors, teachers, bankers, accountants, and even laymen who knew very little, or nothing at all, about mathematics.

My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.

Harvard prides itself on its diversity – economic, racial, social, geographical – but it remains intellectually segregated. It’s not what conservative commentators seem to imagine – a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.

Professors of classics – not even a professor of English – professors of classics, they’re something sacred; it’s almost like being a priest.

Business school professors don’t take selling seriously because they don’t know how to sell. It’s easy to talk about business theory and production time and just-in-time development. Selling is much more difficult.

The Indian diaspora is not a capital-accumulating diaspora. The Indian diaspora is doctors, lawyers, professors. Or newspaper sellers. They are basically trade- or profession-oriented, and so they’re not major investors in their home country.

It’s funny, because when I was in college, all my professors said, ‘You should do comedy.’ And I was like, ‘No! No!’ But I was able to get my foot in the door through comedy. I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to do it.

Ideally, I’d love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as… dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.

My mother wanted me to be a professor, because I have several people in my family who are professors at university.

There’s a real difference of what one believed was one’s chief responsibility between American professors and Chinese professors. This was vividly revealed to me when I compared what I could learn in Chicago and what I could learn in China.

I liked Columbia, but it was like high school in that there was this big social world that I was not part of. I existed on the side, far away. That might be temperamental, my own fear of large groups, more than anything else. But I had a handful of professors who meant a lot to me.

Productivity is going to be a critical issue. And it’s not just about getting more time for professors in the classroom. It involves reexamining the learning experience and restructuring faculty and the use of faculty time.

My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey’s top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors.

Some of the perceptions from my professors were that I was less than or that I wouldn’t be able to compete or wouldn’t be able to meet the same bar as my peers. I don’t want that for my daughter or for any of the girls who come into our program.

Even being too good at teaching is risky at research universities; the joke is that a ‘teacher of the year’ award is the kiss of death for non-tenured professors.

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions – which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

I try not to deal with people’s hostility, though I must if they have something I need from them, as the professors did at Columbia or my landlord did.

When we go out to the university, the professors always say, ‘Tell these students about your five-year plan and your 10-year plan,’ and I say, ‘Gee, we’re lucky if we have a year plan.’

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

Having studied at the Sorbonne, I spent my 21st birthday in Paris and celebrated with one of my professors in a cafe outside of Notre Dame.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

In law school, I earned the respect of professors and served on the editorial board of ‘The Yale Law Journal.’

In an increasingly complex world, with courseloads becoming heavier and heavier, shouldn’t we be opting for more accountability when it comes to our professors, not less?

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.

The university is in danger of losing its monopoly, and for good reason. The most visible threat are the new online courses, many of them free, with some of the best professors in their respective fields.

At 16, when I was at Henry M. Gunn High School, I had a crush on the English teacher, and my grades improved dramatically. This great school had only 400 students, mostly children of Stanford professors, and it was more usual to have classes under one of the oak trees dotted around the campus than in the classroom.

Being no bigot myself to any mode of worship, I am disposed to endulge the professors of Christianity in the church, that road to heaven which to them shall seem the most direct plainest easiest and least liable to exception.

I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.

One thing that used to worry me is the fact that it seemed like Harvard was this big scary thing where I would have to spend all my time studying just to get in. But getting to go to both campuses of Harvard and Oxford and getting to meet some of the professors was absolutely amazing.

When I became a professor of physics circa 1991, I doubled the number of female professors of physics in the U.K.

In film schools of the future, professors will teach ‘Tammy’ as an object lesson in Making Everything Go Wrong.

College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.

I write to be read. I’m quite direct about that. I’m not writing to thrill colleagues or to impress the professors at the University of Iowa; that’s not my goal.

A good traditional conceptual instruction is what I got from my better professors at MIT. They would be at a chalkboard, and they would literally be explaining something and working through a problem, but it wasn’t rote. They were explaining the underlying theory and processes and intuition behind it.

When I was studying in JNU, I realised how students and professors address each other as comrades.

The resources at Harvard – its professors, our fellow students, the libraries, its alumni – created for me the opportunity to pursue my passions in finance.

Individuals whose asylum claims have been accepted have gone on to become professors, soldiers in our military, artists, and more.

I’m indebted to the teachers who shaped me – from the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Croix Catholic elementary to the monks of St. John’s in Minnesota to my professors at Georgetown.

Preparing America’s student loan crippled grads to enter a hopeless and crowded job market is no easy task, which is why we should show more love to our nation’s professors.

Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world.

Although I loved working on technology – I’ve always been a computer geek at heart – my professors encouraged me to get a real-world job working with customers.

I do think there’s not enough film history being taught and appreciated. Maybe it’s being taught, but I’ve heard from professors that young kids don’t want to look at black-and-white movies. And that’s 85 years of film history, with masterpiece after masterpiece.

Professors simply can’t discuss a thing. Habit compels them to deliver a lecture.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they’d read or understood.

Have you ever heard of the book ‘Freakonomics?’ So there’s these two economics professors, and they’re really interesting guys, and they wrote these books. And it’s really all about sort of false thinking. They try to go in and look at a number of different phenomenon.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.