Quotes about professor
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Arthur Jensen photo

“I felt even somewhat resentful of my prior education, that I could have gone as far as I had—already a fairly well-recognized professor of educational psychology—and yet could have remained so unaware of the crucial importance of genetic factors for the study of individual differences.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), p. 424
Context: I had begun by trying, for the sake of scholarly thoroughness, merely to write a short chapter for my book on the ‘culturally disadvantaged’ that I expected would succinctly review the so-called nature-nurture issue only to easily dismiss it as being of little or no importance for the subsequent study of the causes of scholastic failure and success. I delved into practically all the available literature on the genetics of intelligence, beginning with the works of the most prominent investigator in this field, Sir Cyril Burt, whom I had previously heard give a brilliant lecture entitled The Inheritance of Mental Ability’ at University College, London in 1957. The more I read in this field, the less convinced I became of the prevailing belief in the all-importance of environment and learning as the mechanisms of individual and group differences in general ability and scholastic aptitude. I felt even somewhat resentful of my prior education, that I could have gone as far as I had—already a fairly well-recognized professor of educational psychology—and yet could have remained so unaware of the crucial importance of genetic factors for the study of individual differences.

Alan Watts photo

“Furthermore, the younger members of our society have for some time been in growing rebellion against paternal authority and the paternal state. For one reason, the home in an industrial society is chiefly a dormitory, and the father does not work there, with the result that wife and children have no part in his vocation. He is just a character who brings in money, and after working hours he is supposed to forget about his job and have fun. Novels, magazines, television, and popular cartoons therefore portray "Dad" as an incompetent clown. And the image has some truth in it because Dad has fallen for the hoax that work is simply something you do to make money, and with money you can get anything you want.
It is no wonder that an increasing proportion of college students want no part in Dad's world, and will do anything to avoid the rat-race of the salesman, commuter, clerk, and corporate executive. Professional men, too—architects, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and professors—have offices away from home, and thus, because the demands of their families boil down more and more to money, are ever more tempted to regard even professional vocations as ways of making money. All this is further aggravated by the fact that parents no longer educate their own children. Thus the child does not grow up with understanding of or enthusiasm for his father's work. Instead, he is sent to an understaffed school run mostly by women which, under the circumstances, can do no more than hand out mass-produced education which prepares the child for everything and nothing. It has no relation whatever to his father's vocation.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 111

“Fortunately, there seem to be few of his kind, and my subsequent friendships with university professors have proved exciting, stimulating and fun.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Education of a Wandering Man (1989), Ch. 11
Context: Once, when hitchhiking, I was picked up by a professor from some small college. He noticed a book in my coat pocket, and was curious. It was a Modern Library edition, in the limp bindings they used to have, which sold at the time for 95 cents. This one contained Nietzsche‎‎'s Ecce Homo, and The Birth of Tragedy.
The professor was a pedantic man of limited imagination and seemed almost offended that I was reading such a book. Obviously I did not fit some category in which he decided I belonged, and when he dropped me off in town, I suspect he was relived to be rid of me.
He kept asking me why I wanted to read such a book. At first, he doubted I was reading it. Where had I heard of Nietzsche‎‎?
When I told him I thought it was in the preface to a book on Schopenhauer, he was even more disturbed and probably believed I was lying. Fortunately, there seem to be few of his kind, and my subsequent friendships with university professors have proved exciting, stimulating and fun.

Jonathan Haidt photo
Witold Gombrowicz photo
Diana Gabaldon photo

“I was a university professor and all of my degrees were in the biological sciences, so I did know my way around a library. That’s why I decided on historical fiction. It seems easier to look things up than to make them up. If it turned out I had no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record!”

Diana Gabaldon (1952) American author

On how library research helps her write accurately in “Caught Between Two Worlds – Diana Gabaldon Interview” https://www.scotsmagazine.com/articles/diana-gabaldon-outlander-inspiration/ in The Scots Magazine (2018 Mar 2)

Vivek Agnihotri photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo
I. F. Stone photo
Bill McKibben photo
G. I. Gurdjieff photo
Baruch Spinoza photo

“Frankie Boyle: Thanks to Phill, Goldie and Miles, Noel, Professor Green and Michelle. This has been a disaster. Good night!”

Frankie Boyle (1972) Scottish comedian

Never Mind The Buzzcocks Series 24 Episode 12

Jerzy Vetulani photo

“With all due respect for the title of professor. Vetulani, however, is a unique moron.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Cezary Gmyz, right-wing journalist, in an entry from his Twitter account https://twitter.com/cezarygmyz/status/642096205737119744.

Jerzy Vetulani photo

“Professor writes about the brain in a very approachable way, and from what he writes, the conviction that man is free is born. The message of his books influenced, among others, the emergence of several of my painting cycles. For me he is an authority, and I do not have many of them.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Iwona Siwek-Front, painter, friend of Vetulani in an interview Artystka, to jak glebogryzarka http://www.bloge12.pl/artystka-to-jak-glebogryzarka/ (in Polish), Mazowiecki Instytut Kultury, 2014.

Jerzy Vetulani photo

“It is the most obvious fact that Jerzy Vetulani is an extraordinary personality who masterfully combines deep knowledge with the art of rhetoric, form and beauty of expression. But I have trouble answering the question: Who is Professor Vetulani really? There is no doubt that he is an eminent scholar, a star of Polish science, but he is also an unconventional man – what shocked me two years ago when he marched in the first line of the Cannabis Legalization March.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Jacek Purchla, art historian, director of the International Cultural Centre in Kraków and the President of the Polish National Commission for UNESCO. An introduction to Vetulani's lecture during the GAP Symposium in Szczyrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtGOlcQaIdM (in Polish), January 2016.

Zygmunt Vetulani photo
Raghuram G. Rajan photo

“Mr Raghuram Rajan is an outstanding man who understands central banking. He is probably only one in the world among the crowds of professors at central banks that actually has a good grip on monetary policies and what you can or cannot achieve with them. He should get the Noble Prize in economics but the others are all money printers at heart, all of them.”

Raghuram G. Rajan (1963) Indian economist

Marc Faber, economist, as quoted in " Raghuram Rajan only central banker I trust, he should get Nobel in Economics: Marc Faber http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-12/news/65490521_1_marc-faber-rbi-governor-boom-doom-report", The Economic Times (12 August 2015)

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis photo

“No technique of random sample has, so far as I can find, been developed in the United States or elsewhere, which can compare in accuracy or in economy with that described by Professor Mahalanobis.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

By Harold Hoteliing a well-known US mathematical statistician, in 1938 quoted in "Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in India."

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis photo

“I need hardly say that I refer to the emergence of a statistically competent technique of Sample Survey, with which I believe Professor Mahalanobis name will always be associated.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Sir Ronald Fisher in "Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in India"

C. V. Raman photo

“Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.”

Margaret Singer (1921–2003) clinical psychology

Richard Behar, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,972865-9,00.html, Time Magazine, May 6, 1991
About, Recognized expert

Richard Rodríguez photo

“His name was William Saroyan. He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told… I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city — in New York or Paris — in order to write… When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. … Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan...
"Time Of Our Lives" (26 May 1997) http://www.cilicia.com/armo22_william_saroyan_6.html

“The first director of Hopkins didn’t get along with him so Ricketts would have to wait until he was out of town to sneak into the library with the help of some sympathetic professor.”

Ed Ricketts (1897–1948) American marine biologist

Mark Denny, DeNault Professor in Marine Science/Biomechanics. http://stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2002/novdec/features/hopkins.html

Richard D. Wolff photo
Amy Coney Barrett photo

“The maxim "A university professor is the next easiest profession after a beggar" really rings true.”

Goro Shimura (1930–2019) Japanese mathematician

[The Map of My Life, 2008, 7, https://books.google.com/books?id=eYuojP7kgvkC&pg=PA7]

“Why are students learning business from business professors whose businesses failed?”

Christian Canlubo (2002) Filipino Internet Entrepreneur

Christian Canlubo on his twitter https://twitter.com/canlubochris account.

Source: https://twitter.com/canlubochris/status/1236684517823283200 | Christian Canlubo personal Twitter account

James K. Morrow photo
George Packer photo
Milton Friedman photo

“Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volunteer,' your army is 'professional,' and the enemy's army is 'mercenary.' All these three words mean exactly the same thing. I am a volunteer professor, I am a mercenary professor, and I am a professional professor. And all you people around here are mercenary professional people. And I trust you realize that. It's always a puzzle to me why people should think that the term 'mercenary' somehow has a negative connotation.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

And this is much more broadly based. In fact, I think mercenary motives are among the least unattractive that we have.
The Draft: A Handbook of Facts and Alternatives, Sol Tax, edit., chapter: “Why Not a Voluntary Army?” University of Chicago Press (1967) p. 366, based on the Conference Held at the University of Chicago, December 4-7, 1966

Edmund Burke photo
Milton Friedman photo

“Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volunteer,' your army is 'professional,' and the enemy's army is 'mercenary.' All these three words mean exactly the same thing. I am a volunteer professor, I am a mercenary professor, and I am a professional professor. And all you people around here are mercenary professional people. And I trust you realize that. It's always a puzzle to me why people should think that the term 'mercenary' somehow has a negative connotation. I remind you of that wonderful quotation of Adam Smith when he said, 'You do not owe your daily bread to the benevolence of the baker, but to his proper regard for his own interest.'”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

And this is much more broadly based. In fact, I think mercenary motives are among the least unattractive that we have.
Source: The Draft: A Handbook of Facts and Alternatives, Sol Tax, edit., chapter: “Recruitment of Military Manpower Solely by Voluntary Means,” chairman: Aristide Zolberg, University of Chicago Press (1967) p. 366, based on the Conference Held at the University of Chicago, December 4-7, 1966, also in Two Lucky People, Milton and Rose Friedman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 380.

Dianne Feinstein photo
Tyrone Hayes photo

“Clearly there’s some entity that doesn’t really include us, the professors and students, and doesn’t really protect our academic freedom, I think, the way that it should.”

Tyrone Hayes (1967) American biologist

Silencing the Scientist: Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted by Herbicide Firm Syngenta https://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/21/silencing_the_scientist_tyrone_hayes_on (February 21, 2014)

Arthur C. Clarke photo

“You know, we’re not used to secrecy up here. It’s not encouraged. We all have to work together to keep alive. Secrecy is corrosive, Professor, bad for morale.”

Source: 2000s and posthumous publications, A Time Odyssey, Sunstorm (2005), Chapter 9, “Lunar Descent” (p. 53)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo

“Beware of zealots of any flavor. Beware of proselytizers of religious utopias. And beware of professors who confuse teaching students how to think with teaching them what to think.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

Epilogue: Letter to My Unborn Daughter (p. 273)
2010s, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)