Professor Quotes

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep. (W. H. Auden)
I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked for his final counsel. He replied, 'Verify your quotations.' View quote
Winston Churchill
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor. View quote
Søren Kierkegaard
My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English. View quote
Eric Allin Cornell
I like the Stooges. You know what movie I saw that I sort of discovered late was Jerry Lewis in 'The Nutty Professor'. I really liked that. View quote
Mike Judge
In my memoir, I wanted to introduce American women to Iranian women and our lives. I'm not from the highest echelons of society, nor the lowest. I'm a women who is a lawyer, who is a professor at a university, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, I cook. And even when I'm about to go to prison, one of the first things I do is to make enough food and put it in the fridge for my family. View quote
Shirin Ebadi
[A]s a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter [a supporter of the theory of continental drift]. [...] Today [...] my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift-a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation. View quote
Norman Mailer
To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person's really smart and they're doing fantastic work, I don't care if they're a high school kid or a Harvard professor; it's the work that matters. View quote
Jimmy Wales
I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof. View quote
G. H. Hardy
Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases - the second law of thermodynamics - holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences. (Ronald Fisher)
A practitioner in panegyric, or, to speak more plainly, a professor of the art of puffing. View quote
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
I went around to the little schoolhouses, talking like a professor, explaining our platform. We were lucky if the collection gave us enough for gas to get to the next place. We encouraged questions, and people asked us if it was true we were going to take their farms, like the Soviets in Russia, and did we believe in God. View quote
Tommy Douglas
Can a geology teacher blithely tell his students that the earth is flat, or a European history professor that the Holocaust didn't happen? That's not academic freedom, but dereliction of duty. View quote
Jerry Coyne
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week. View quote
Evan Esar
After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that. View quote
Irving Kristol
A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, "Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” The keen old prof replied, "And who is asking?”. View quote
Saul Bellow
My dear Professor, a war would have cost us at least 30,000 brave soldiers, and at best we should have gained nothing by it. Besides, anyone who has once looked into the glassy eyes of a dying warrior on the battle-field would think twice before beginning a war. View quote
Otto von Bismarck
When I came back from Munich, it was September, and I was Professor of Mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Later I learned that I had been the Department's third choice, after two numerical analysts had turned the invitation down; the decision to invite me had not been an easy one, on the one hand because I had not really studied mathematics, and on the other hand because of my sandals, my beard and my "arrogance" (whatever that may be). View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries; it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology. (Pierre Trudeau)
Philosophy-reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse-develops from this point on in a different atmosphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life, or a form of life-unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy. View quote
Pierre Hadot
Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks. View quote
Randall Jarrell
[Jason] faltered when he looked at Leo, who was mimicking taking notes with an air pencil. "Go on, Professor Grace!” he said, wide-eyed. "I wanna get an A on the test. View quote
Rick Riordan
One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-lay-chee-a with a Ph.D!' The dinner was in her house. And I said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing, but they had more books in their house than you do.' I was a little insulted by the Appa-lay-chee-a business. View quote
Charles Frazier