Top 100 Yale Quotes

A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service: The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.

I actually started out as a poet in high school. I published in small literary magazines for probably about ten years. I entered the Yale Younger Poet contest every year, until I was too old to be a younger poet, and I never got more than a form rejection letter from them.

My favorite play that I did was at Yale. It’s called ‘The Island.’

My interest in protein breakdown as a research problem began in l955 at about the time I joined the Biochemistry Department of Yale University. It was known that proteins break down intracellularly in the mature animal.

Researches at Yale found a connection between brain cancer and work environment. The No. 1 most dangerous job for developing brain cancer? Plutonium hat model.

I reject the idea that the guy who comes out of Yale and goes to work in the projects in Newark is good, and the guy who goes to work for a white-shoe law firm is bad. We’re all mountain rangers. We all have peaks and valleys.

So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. A man who invested wisely would be admired, but a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion.

I flew back and forth and did episodes of Roseanne while I was at Yale.

I never thought that I would pursue a cappella music. I went to Yale College and I was going to go into the medical field.

All that time I spent chasing Yale was time I could have been using to actually make a difference in the world. Bravery, not perfection, was the key that unlocked all the doors I’ve walked through since.

As a physics major at Yale in the 1970s, I developed crushes on nearly all my male professors.

When I was at Yale, I was one of the students chosen to go to China. I lived there for 1-1/2 years and I can speak Mandarin fluently.

I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.

When I left Yale, it was so painful to me. I had worked so hard, gotten so far, and just walked away.

I don’t think the alternative to Yale is jail by any means. On the other hand, there is a mass of research that does show that there are real advantages to your subsequent career in going to selective institutions.

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world of the American elite works.

As an undergrad, I was the editor of the Yale humor magazine, and since then, I’ve published humor in the ‘New York Times’ and ‘Atlantic,’ among other places.

In 1989, I had a fellowship to teach for Yale in China for two years. I came back from California to New Haven to spend the summer learning Chinese, but because of Tiananmen Square, Yale cancelled the program.

Living among society’s outcasts and experiencing the brutality of America’s prison system did more to set (or confirm) the direction of my adult life than living at Yale.

I am a Yale Law School graduate.

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.

I went to Yale and I was a physics and philosophy undergrad, graduated in 2005.

When I got out of Yale Drama School, I was completely broke.

To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.

Before I went to work for ‘Playboy,’ I planned to apply to Yale to get a public policy master’s. I felt drawn to go into politics. Even before that, my dream was to wind up either in the Senate or on the Supreme Court. I had big dreams as a little girl.

I first studied the effect of plants on humans for my Yale thesis… and it was a 185-page thesis, and luckily I got honors on it.

You tell me one other person that graduated from Yale that is as inarticulate as Bush. Yale’s a great school, and here’s this idiot.

I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

I learned at Yale, one of the biggest lessons was to learn how special I am and therefore how totally unspecial I am. I was special among everyone else who was special. The fact that we’re all so individual and that’s what makes us special.

I entered Yale in the fall of 1951, and about November of that year, Bill Buckley published ‘God and Man at Yale.’

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

There were several things a Yale freshman was supposed to be able to do. You had to demonstrate in the Olympic-size Yale pool that you could swim 50 yards or be inducted into swimming class.

I really liked Yale, although it was extremely intimidating. When I visited the campus, I was hiding behind trees, I felt so unworthy.

Yale? I was at Yale on a scholarship.

I headed off to Yale, and eventually Georgetown Law, but I never forgot where I came from. I came back to South Carolina to teach 9th grade social studies.

With Yale, my world got so big all of a sudden. At school, if you could dream it, someone would make it so that you could do it. It was magical. I had a lot going on, as you do when you’re 17, and didn’t necessarily capitalize on all of it, but it made me see possibility in a way that I hadn’t before.

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don’t like that feeling.

When I decided to go to art school, it wasn’t necessarily something I thought I needed. No one talked about graduate school when I was an undergrad. I went on to a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that transition from Yale to the Studio Museum, that was the real beginning of my professional career.

I went to the Women’s Campaign School at Yale; I went to Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Training, women’s campaign fund training. I got to know the district really well by talking to the county chair, getting to know politics, working on some local races.

My entire life, people have told me that I couldn’t do certain things. They told me I couldn’t go to college. They told me I couldn’t go to Yale, Georgetown, couldn’t end up doing much on Capitol Hill. Couldn’t be party chair. And my response has always been, ‘Watch me.’

I did some acting in high school and then a little more in college, and it just was the thing that I felt that I wanted to do more than anything else. And then I was fortunate enough to audition for and get into Yale Drama School right after college, and I spent three years there.

We, as Yale students, pride ourselves on being bright, curious and engaged citizens. We are part of an institution that aims to educate its students to better the world. We tend to think that we do not fit the stereotype of ignorance and apathy that is all too often associated with America.

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.

By the time Clinton graduated from Yale Law School, many people, including her boyfriend Bill, believed she could, and should, embark on a political career. She’d given the Wellesley commencement speech that had earned her a ‘Life’ write-up of her own.

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

I went to Yale for undergrad.

When I left Yale, I was prepared to write anything.

I went to an all-girls pre school where everyone went off to Harvard or Yale, and I had zero interest in doing so. I think they thought I was on drugs. There was a neighboring all-boys school, so we’d get together and do dumb things. It was your typical Catholic-American upbringing.

At Yale, you can find someone passionate and enthusiastic and involved in just about any issue. For many of us, though, our school’s prevailing progressive political atmosphere can make us complacent.

Yale was one of the best moments in my life – also one of the hardest. I learned about community.

When I went to college, I thought I was going to become a professional musician. I was a French horn player, so I went to Yale to study with a very unusual French horn player.

I don’t have an MBA, and I didn’t go to Yale. I’m not an academic person and wasn’t a good student. Instead, I’ve been taught by some of the most inspiring people in the world.