In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama learning the literature on evolution what was known about it biologically just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular scientific view of the world.

A University should be a place of light of liberty and of learning.

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political intellectual and cultural leaders in Asia.

A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge.

The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well that society can not exist unless it goes on.

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

I am not a member of any organization listed by the Attorney General as subversive. In any instance where I lent my name in the past it was certainly without knowledge that such an organization was subversive. I have always been essentially and foremost an American.

It will be readily admitted that a degree conferred by an university ought to be a pledge to the public that he who holds it possesses a certain quantity of knowledge.

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world with all its corruption and evils and cruelties and the splendid world of our imagination.

The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

The great thing about university is that they incline you to get up and do it from the Classics to modern plays to the humor that Monty Pythons made popular.

The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life yeah I guess so. I guess some do political humor some do topical humor but the ones that I like the ones that are appealing to me were guys who were just talking to you about their life.

I love the diversity of America. I love the plain normal sense of humor Americans have. It is not wicked like in some countries. And I also love how new America is.

They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

If history philosophy and so on vanish from academic life what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term and it would be deceptive to call it one.

I went to Ohio University studying arts and history and playing football. But I was only interested in girls my pals and sports. I only did the minimum for school.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

If we cannot now end our differences at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.