Firkser Harvard Quotes

I sometimes think that when he was at Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama cut class the day they got to the separation of powers, 'cause he seems to consider it not just an inconvenience but an indignity that, although he got 270 electoral votes and therefore gets to be president, he didn't get everything. ~ George Will

Entrepreneur, design thinking is the ability to create, portray and deliver tomorrow's distinction, today. ~ ~ Onyi Anyado

When one considers our nation's educational foundations - Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most of our respected institutions were originally Christian - it becomes evident why we, as Christians, maintain a passion about remaining true to the foundations of Scripture. ~ Jonathan Falwell

Mom also believed that there is such a thing as a good secret. Maybe something kind you did for someone but didn't want that person to know, because you didn't want him to be embarrassed or feel as though he owed you anything. I thought back to a Harvard student of Mom's, an aspiring playwright who won an award to travel in Europe - but the award didn't exist. Mom had simply paid, anonymously, for him to have enough money to go on what turned out to be a life-changing trip. I write about this only because I was told that years later this fellow figured it all out, when he went to research who else had won this lucrative traveling fellowship and discovered that the answer was no one. As ~ Will Schwalbe

Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy - witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence for years. ~ Annalee Newitz

As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How ~ Christine Kenneally

Krister Stendhal, a Lutheran minister and Harvard University Dean gave these rules of Religious understanding for reporters to use when they are reporting on a religion.

Stendahl's Three Rules of Religious Understanding

(1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

(2) Don't compare your best to their worst.

(3) Leave room for "holy envy." (By this Stendahl meant that you should be willing to recognize elements in the other religious tradition or faith that you admire and wish could, in some way, be reflected in your own religious tradition or faith.) ~ Kristner Stendhal

During that year at Harvard learning with Carl Steinitz, I had the feeling that I was drinking knowledge out of a fire hose. I learned more in that year than I had learned in the previous ten years of my education. ~ Jack Dangermond

The time I have already spent at Harvard has been a stimulating experience, and I look forward to developing my relationship and activities with the students, faculty and friends of the Harvard Business School community. ~ Alex Ferguson

Nigeria was a blank on the map - there weren't even any maps. The US State Department, everyone said don't go there. It was courageous of Harvard University: the notion was that we would match Harvard students with Nigerian students, so that every student would have a guide, creating a guarantee of intimacy with the city. ~ Rem Koolhaas

A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities. ~ Anant Agarwal

These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school. ~ Barry Sonnenfeld

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable. ~ Mark Steyn

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco. ~ Douglass North

Nor could I fail to recall my friendship with Howard K. Beale, professor of American History at the University of North Carolina. There he was, one day in 1940, standing just outside my room in the men's dormitory at St. Augustine's, in his chesterfield topcoat, white silk scarf, and bowler hat, with his calling card in hand, perhaps looking for a silver tray in which to drop it. Paul Buck, whom he knew at Harvard, had told him to look me up. He wanted to invite me to his home in Chapel Hill to have lunch or dinner and to meet his family. From that point on we saw each other regularly.
After I moved to Durham, he invited me each year to give a lecture on "The Negro in American Social Thought" in one of his classes. One day when I was en route to Beale's class, I encountered one of his colleagues, who greeted me and inquired where I was going. I returned the greeting and told him that I was going to Howard Beale's class to give a lecture. After I began the lecture I noticed that Howard was called out of the class. He returned shortly, and I did not give it another thought. Some years later, after we both had left North Carolina, Howard told me that he had been called out to answer a long-distance phone call from a trustee of the university who had heard that a Negro was lecturing in his class. The trustee ordered Beale to remove me immediately. In recounting this story, Beale told me that he had said that he was not in the habit of letting trustees plan his courses, and h ~ John Hope Franklin

One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack. ~ Stephen Spender

When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert ... Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust ~ Margaret Heffernan

I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard. ~ Junot Diaz

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas. ~ M.H. Abrams

Listen' he whispered ferociously, like a ferocious breeze or a very gentle hurricane. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

Seeing the way leadership works in the real world is a tad more enlightening than reading case studies as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. ~ Jeetendr Sehdev

As soon as we were inside, Edwart's family rushed to greet me. What seemed like thirty people circled me, chattering away.
"Oh my god, you smell good."
"Good smell, good smell."
"(she really does smell good.)"
"do you mind if I put my nose right on you? Right on your arm?"
"More smelly smelly please."
"If I could destroy every part of my brain except the part that smelled your smell, I would do it. I would do it in a second."
"Let's go, Belle," Edwart whispered and grabbed my hand. We pushed through the ravenous vampires nad out the front door.
"So that went well!" I said outside in the U-HAUL. I sniffed my hair. I did smell good.
"No, no, that wasn't my house," Edwart said, starting the truck. "I don't even know those people! Sometimes I get addresses confused. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

Every Harvard class should have one Democrat to rescue it from oblivion. ~ Will Rogers

"Law professors were never like economics professors," a Harvard Law professor told me. "If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool." ~ Calvin Trillin

I can not remember telling my parents that I was studying classics, they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard-put to name one less useful in Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys of an executive bathroom. Now I would like to make it clear in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I can not criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor. And I quite agree with them, that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty, entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression, It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something by which to pride yourself, but poverty itself, is romanticized only by fools. But I feared at your age was not poverty, but failure... Now, I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted, and well educated, that you have never known heartbreak, hardship, or heartache. Talent and intelligence, never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates... ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. ~ J.K. Rowling

As the Harvard University strategist Graham Allison summed it up: "Historically, there has always been a gap between people's individual anger and what they could do with their anger. But thanks to modern technology, and the willingness of people to commit suicide, really angry individuals can now kill millions of people if they can get the right materials." And that is becoming steadily easier with the globalization of flows and the rise of 3-D printing, by which you can build almost anything in your basement, if it can fit. In ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he'd stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn't want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever. "Don't ~ Lev Grossman

I don't think I was funny until college. I lived with some Harvard MD/PhD students - they were so smart, and what I contributed to the house was, I was the funny one. ~ Wendy Liebman

I got a wonderful college education. I went to Harvard. In those four years I accumulated a lot of knowledge but I also created a kind of habit of learning that has stayed with me my whole life. ~ John Lithgow

Disengaged employees are an unfortunate reality in the workplace, and poor leadership is often to blame. ~ W.Chan Kim

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries. ~ Robert Darnton

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. ~ Jimmy Wales

From the first winter afternoon in the Harvard ball fields, "Oh no
I need you" had become an admission and a clarion call
the tenet of dependency that forms the weft of friendship. We needed each other so that we could count the endless days of forests and flat water, but the real need was soldered by the sadder, harder moments
discord or helplessness or fear
that we dared to expose to each other. It took me years to grasp that this grit and discomfort in any relationship are an indicator of closeness, not it's opposite. ~ Gail Caldwell

More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive - incorrect - answer. ~ Daniel Kahneman

That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are. ~ Elliott Carter

Entrepreneur, with the growth of social media and the global market now local, now is the time to grow your leadership brand. ~ Onyi Anyado

I'm not impressed by people's degrees. Harvard doesn't impress me, Yale doesn't impress me, Columbia doesn't impress me. ~ Sean Hannity

While living in America when I attended Harvard in the early 1970s, I saw for myself the awesome, almost miraculous, power of a people to change policy through democratic means. ~ Benazir Bhutto

Follow your dreams, Bailey," she says. "Be they Harvard or something else entirely. No matter what that father of yours says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone's dream once, himself." Bailey ~ Erin Morgenstern

Quick, I told myself. Try to remember what you learned from Jimbo's Self Defence for Young Ladies. Jimbo was a beefy man with prison tats.
"Go into the nearest dark alley," I recalled Jimbo saying. "Freeze like a rabbit or the creature you desire your attacker to mistake you for. If your attacker shouts out to you, respond politely - maybe your optimism will change his mind. If you're about to get into an elevator with a man you feel uncomfortable spending time with in a small, escapeless room, head right in. Remember , fear i an irrational emotion, you should probably ignore it."
Armed with these tips, I hung a right into the nearest dead-end, curled into a ball and started rolling. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

When I first came to Harvard, I thought to myself, 'What kind of an Indian am I?' because I did not grow up on a reservation. But being an Indian is a combination of things. It's your blood. It's your spirituality. And it's fighting for the Indian people. ~ Winona LaDuke

By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy.32 Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.33 ~ Thomas Piketty