Quotes by American Authors - Page 293

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
Charles Franklin Kettering
Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can be created using the same set of tools and rules.
Dan Roam
Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.
Saul D. Alinsky
There was a problem and that was that. Why didnt make a fiddlers fuck.
Hubert Selby Jr.
PREFACE PROBLEM: Nobody reads prefaces.SOLUTION: Call the preface Chapter 1.NEW PROBLEM CREATED BY SOLUTION: Chapter 1 is boring.RESOLUTION: Throw away Chapter 1 and call Chapter 2 Chapter 1.
Gerald M. Weinberg
I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more complicated.
Poul Anderson
You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.
Criss Jami
The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer
Terence McKenna
..."There’s really no way I can explain it to her without *still* sounding like scum," I complained to Sinter."The 'sympathy shack-up' doesn’t score many points," he agreed.*
Molly Ringle
I was not use to that kind of hunger, even as a poor college student.
Julie Wenzel
In your temporary failure there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.
Abraham Lincoln
I used to think all that game playing was par for the course and even kind of exciting. It just felt logical to pursue a boy the same way I applied to college—by expending exorbitant time and energy showing what a great catch I am and what a perfect match we’d be, so that after a lengthy waiting period I might get accepted. But now the idea of reliving any version of that charade seems like hell.
Daria Snadowsky
Going to college don't make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an over can call itself a biscuit.
Laura Lippman
And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future-you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can't afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.
John Green
...the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly.
Lee Doren
In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions.
Philip Roth
This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became a professor without holding a job outside academia. How can we expect these professors to adequately explain what people who oppose them believe?
Lee Doren
It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.
Russell Kirk
You have a college degree? You can barely talk.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Maybe we were being a bit unrealistic, but we had this hope that if we could just get into the Ivy League, everything would be set. We dreamed of Gothic libraries and leafy green quads and romantic dorms with fireplaces and guys who were not only cute but also smart and charming, and, quite possibly, British. In college, we believed, we’d finally find our people.
Sarah Strohmeyer
It was a running joke; everyone was aware of how ridiculous the rumor mill was, and yet they all shamelessly participated in it.
Jamie McGuire
In my freshman and sophomore years of college, I read dozens of books by the great thinkers of Western civilization. From Plato to Nietzsche, Homer to Shakespeare - you name it, I read it. At times it drove me crazy - picture reading hundreds of pages that sound like this every week: "All rational knowledge is either material and concerned with some object, or formal and concerned only with the form of understanding and of reason themselves and with the universal rules of thought in general without regard to differences of its objects." Come again, Kant?
Stefanie Weisman
The college diploma has no more power to hold the knowledge you have gained in college than a piece of tissue paper over a gas jet can hold the gas in the pipe.
Orison Swett Marden
Ah, group projects. Some people love 'em, some people hate 'em - okay, most people hate 'em. Your grade now depends on other people whom you may never have met before, and you've somehow got to do the impossible: find some time when a bunch of super-busy high school or college students can actually meet in person.
Stefanie Weisman
College is a blossoming new world of genital opportunity.
Thomm Quackenbush
The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.
Renata Adler
College is a different scene than it was ten years ago. It used to be all about sex and drugs. Now it’s all about texting and fast food.
Aaron B. Powell
I've learned a lot playing college ball," Mark says."What you do in high school doesn't mean shit. You can be the best ballplayer in your high school. The best in the country or state, but when you get to college, you're going to meet fifty other guys who can brag the same thing. You'll meet guys better than you, stronger than you, faster than you, and then you're up against better teams. The world changes when you leave Groveton.
Katie McGarry
Don't ever let anyone tell you that college is for smart people. College eats smart people alive.
Hannah Moskowitz
President Obama smoked so much pot in college he never learned to spell. Which is why he's confusing the word "ruining" the country with "running" the country.
Kilburn Hall
I've asked around and haven't found a B.A. yet who doesn't still have nightmares (and I don't speak figuratively) about not being able to find the room where the exam is to be given or about realizing at the last moment that he has not once attended the course.
Elizabeth Savage
College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.
John Cage
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Of course he had a female following. Was there anything college girls found sexier than being told what to think?
Mira Jacob
So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.
Andrew Delbanco
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
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
One thing they do not teach you in college is what you will actually be doing in a career of your choosing.
Joanie Connell
Think I have made a terrible mistake going to college. Have decided to become a shepherd and spend my days tending to flocks of goats
Scott Frost
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
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
College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.
Stephen King
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
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
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 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
Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer."I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb," he told Rob.
Jeff Hobbs
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
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
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
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
He gave her a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. “Eh, it wouldn’t be so bad. I wouldn’t have to study for the SATs or get a summer job or figure out my major. I can drink Elderflower wine all day, dance all through the night, and sleep on a bower of roses.”Hazel made a face. “I’m pretty sure there are some colleges where you can do that. I bet there are some colleges where you can major in that.
Holly Black