“Remote and ineffectual don.”
“College isn't the place to go for ideas.”
“Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.”
“It is dangerous sending a young man who is beautiful to Oxford.”
“They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.”
“Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.”
“A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.”
“I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.”
“What poor education I have received has been gained in the University of Life.”
“One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.”
“Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.”
“A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.”
“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”
“The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.”
“A college education should equip one to entertain three things: a friend, an idea and oneself.”
“It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree.”
“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”
“The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.”
“I had always imagined that ClichT was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford.”
“Towery city and branching between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.”
“'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.”
“While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.”
“I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.”
“The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.”
“Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.”
“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.”
“University degrees are a bit like adultery: you may not want to get involved with that sort of thing, but you don't want to be thought incapable.”
“The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.”
“Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge.”
“The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.”