(78 votes)   This place is the Devil, or at least his principal residence, they call it the University, but any other appellation would have suited it much better, for study is the last pursuit of the society; the Master eats, drinks, and sleeps, the Fellows drink, dispute and pun, the employments of the undergraduates you will probably conjecture without my description.

Lord Byron
1788-1824, British Poet

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(70 votes)   Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

H. L. Mencken
1880-1956, American Editor, Author, Critic, Humorist

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(70 votes)   The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your moldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.

Antonin Artaud
1896-1948, French Theater Producer, Actor, Theorist

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(60 votes)   To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.

Hannah Arendt
1906-1975, German-born American Political Philosopher

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(52 votes)   I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them -- the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.

Thomas Merton
1915-1968, American Religious Writer, Poet

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(50 votes)   Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(49 votes)   I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.

W. Somerset Maugham
1874-1965, British Novelist, Playwright

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(39 votes)   One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(38 votes)   I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.

William Butler Yeats
1865-1939, Irish Poet, Playwright.

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(37 votes)   Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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(33 votes)   Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.

Camille Paglia
1947-, American Author, Critic, Educator

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(29 votes)   I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

Edward F. Halifax
1881-1959, British Conservative Statesman

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(26 votes)   Remote and ineffectual don.

Hilaire Belloc
1870-1953, British Author

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(25 votes)   Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.

Robert Green Ingersoll
1833-1899, American Orator, Lawyer

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(24 votes)   Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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