Harvard Quotes

I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life. ~ Randall Robinson

What we're really sending you to Harvard for is to get a little of the educations that's so good and plenty there. When it's passed around you don't want to be bashful, but reach right out and take a big helping every time, for I want you to get your share. You;ll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only things a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. ~ George Horace Lorimer

In 1970, Dean Robert Ebert offered me the Chair of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. I moved to Harvard because I missed the university environment and, more particularly, the stimulating interaction with the eager, enthusiastic, and unprejudiced young minds of the students and fellows. ~ Baruj Benacerraf

Organizations can't change their culture unless individual employees change their behavior - and changing behavior is hard. ~ Keith Ferrazzi

Other kids are brought up nice and sent to Harvard and Yale. Me? I was brought up like a mushroom. ~ Frank Costello

Sometimes I get intimidated by people, intellectuals, because I don't have a great education. The only thing I feel helps me compete with all these people, people with degrees from Harvard, that you're thrown in with and have to work with, is that I'm grounded. ~ Andie MacDowell

I think the minority students that we admit to Harvard are every bit as meritorious as the white students that we admit. ~ Derek Bok

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

I am not some preaching farmer with a book under my arm; I am a graduate of Harvard College. ~ Samuel Parris

You have to be really tenacious. You have to keep at it. There are many roads to get there. If you can get yourself into Harvard, that's a good way to go, because every Harvard graduating class, the agencies come trolling around and they'll look for you. So if you go to Harvard, you'll get found there. ~ Louis C.K.

Miles looked so cute, squished on a couch between Will and Trevin. He was polite, too, a gentleman. A fricking sexy gentleman with the biceps of a Harvard crew rower and a smile that truly made her heart throb. ~ Ophelia London

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Harvard students rallied on campus to offer formal, but "cordial," congratulations to their fellow student, Robert T. Lincoln, son of the president-elect and newly dubbed - in honor of the Prince of Wales's recent triumphant American tour - the "Prince of Rails. ~ Harold Holzer

Harvard Law provided an opportunity to learn from a faculty that had shaped the laws of our country and helped to change the world around us. It also offered an opportunity to study with the brightest students and to test myself against the best. ~ Kenneth Chenault

I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to. ~ Winona LaDuke

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook. One such program was this program called Match. People could enter the different courses that they were taking, and see what other courses would be correlated with the courses they are taking. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line. ~ Eugene O'Neill

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper. ~ A.E. Samaan

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

Public image is extremely important in American society and I observed personally that the Presidency of John F. Kennedy did much in the public mind for Harvard. Harvard was an excellent school before Kennedy, but Kennedy embodied a new vision for the United States: a leader who caught the world's imagination and that reflected on his alma mater, Harvard. ~ Henry Rosovsky

As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia. ~ Daniel Goleman

a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body: The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient. ~ Robert Wachter

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

Haven't you heard, the Dread Scott decision has been overturned?"

"Not out here, baby," Warren replied, without a second's hesitation. "For that matter, not in Washington, either, or in Detroit, or at the Vatican, or at the Harvard Law School. People are objects and we use them. Out here, I like to think, the trappings surrounding the transaction are a little more attractive. But we're all the users. ~ Joyce Haber

He did everything. He studied hard. He went to Harvard. He got married. He had children. He worked. He dreamed big. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. He lived the American Dream. And he was called an African Witch Doctor. People asked for his birth certificate. A congressman shouted at him "YOU LIE!" He faced the most recalcitrant Republican Congress ever that was elected by a constituency that wanted to "take the country back."If a black man can be elected as guardian of the American empire, do exactly that, and still not be shielded from racism, what hope is supposed to be left? ~ Mychal Denzel Smith

I think that issues of gender have been discussed widely at Harvard. But I think I was chosen clearly on the merits, and I wish to operate as president on the merits. I think, on one level, we might say that I can affirm that women have the aptitude to do science or to do anything, including being president of Harvard. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness. ~ Jon Krakauer

Both my wife and I went to Harvard, and it's incredibly exciting that our son and daughter are going there and have the chance to experience it. There are many awesome opportunities at Harvard. That's one of its greatest frustrations - not having enough time to take the classes you want to take. ~ Carlton Cuse

Three years in jail is a good corrective for three years at Harvard. ~ Alger Hiss

There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing. ~ Barack Obama

Trying to make the NBA is one of the very few areas where a Harvard degree won't necessarily help. ~ Jeremy Lin

F-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: "those f - ers," or "f - ing cooks"; what they did: "f - ed it up again"; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the "vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language." The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

I got a four year scholarship to Harvard, and while I was there they wanted to groom me for work in the Star Wars program designing weapons ignited by hydrogen bombs. I didn't want to do that. I thought about how many scientists had died in World War II. ~ Michio Kaku

At Harvard I learned most uncomfortably that facts are facts. In Italy I learned that facts are the way you look at them. ~ Sean O'Faolain

I'd say Harvard graduates leave here with a sense of the possible and the limit - and a sense that there are no limits to what humans can do and that you can always be pushing, whatever limit you think might be there. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

Harvard coach Bill Reid would later credit Teddy Roosevelt with saving football. But words in a rule book are one thing. Someone had to show the nation a new way to play the game. The Carlisle Indians did that. ~ Steve Sheinkin

Far from a Harvard student, just had the balls to do it ~ Jay-Z

As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, 'You can't adapt to commuting, because it's entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.' ~ Tom Vanderbilt

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education. ~ Barney Frank

If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause. ~ Charles Morgan

At Harvard, you could tell if a girl would sleep with you by her poster. Modigliani--si. Klimt--no. ~ Magnus Flyte

I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race. ~ Esai Morales

By playing on people's desire to belong to groups, Facebook creates a new, inclusive society. After all, Facebook is not like Harvard College. Anyone with access to the Internet can sign up. ~ Amity Shlaes

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

EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don't start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don't end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don't use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don't Write What You Know.

The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent wo ~ Bret Anthony Johnston

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.

Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?

...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is no ~ Clarence Darrow

I'm going to try to pull a Natalie Portman. Natalie went to Harvard while shooting 'Star Wars'. I don't know how she did it. I want to have lunch with her and ask her - that seems like a bunch of stress right there. ~ Selena Gomez

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

Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students - Mark Zuckerberg's first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don't even appear to be business opportunities at ~ Peter Thiel

The difference between being Mexican and being Chinese, as I can see it, is that when you go to Harvard from a Chinese family, the whole family goes to Harvard. When you're a Mexican and you go to Harvard, you betray the family. ~ Richard Rodriguez

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

I moved back to Boston and joined some of my Harvard classmates at Bain & Co. I quickly realized I enjoyed business. ~ Kenneth Chenault

All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

On May 13, he met the official announcement that England recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn - the sooner the better - that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in England - literally no one - doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared. ~ Henry Adams

Understood what the struggle was about. My mother. Couldn't read or write, but she had more sense than many a graduate from Harvard. ~ Al Lewis

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

I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: 'Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree.' I want to thank Harvard for this honor. I'll be changing my job next year and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume! ~ Bill Gates

I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, 'Why do you want to go here?' And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn't have been more delusional in terms of what I thought they wanted in a candidate for college. ~ Mike Birbiglia

He made small talk on the way about how he was abandoned as a child and will only rest easy once he is avenged. His name was Tom. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the dust cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke.

Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend ha ~ Robert Penn Warren

One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase "looking for life, destroying life," Then he explained, "It's an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies." I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world's errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, the "hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember. ~ Tracy Kidder

You must keep a vigilant watch for your self-limiting assumptions. ~ Isaac Lidsky

I don't know where you'd find such a magazine." ~ on the stipulations set by a benefactor to the Harvard Advocate that the staff contain no Jews, homosexuals, or drunks ~ Kenneth Koch

That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition. ~ Anna Quindlen

Made in America. Heck, let's make everything in America. Let's make pride and trust and teamwork more than chalk on a Harvard blackboard. ~ Chris Bent

Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking, ~ Robert A. Caro

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

For example, Shawn Cole, a professor at Harvard Business School, finds that Indian state-owned banks increase their lending to the politically important but relatively poor constituency of farmers by about 5 to 10 percentage points in election years.51 The effect is most pronounced in districts with close elections. The consequences of the lending are greater loan defaults and no measurable increase in agricultural output, which suggest that it really serves as a costly form of income redistribution. ~ Raghuram G. Rajan

I want to make as much of a contribution as I can, to Harvard, to higher education and hopefully, to education around the world. ~ Jim Breyer

Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich (2006) reported that there are more than 100 billion galaxies. One of these, our own relative speck of a galaxy, has a few hundred billion stars, many of which, like our Sun-star, are circled by planets. On the scale of outer space, we are less than a single grain of sand on all the oceans' beaches, and our lifetime but a relative nanosecond. ~ David G. Myers

The next day was wonderful...and terrible. So, overall, I guess it was okay. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

Gods also remain important because of their functions. We can turn to places with relatively less religiosity to see why gods are so important everywhere else. In Sacred and Secular (2004), the political scientists Pippa Norris of Harvard and Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan show that, in prosperous regions where secular forms of social services and justice become really effective, religiosity dwindles. This inverse relationship between secular justice and economic equality and religious adherence suggests that the social functions of religion can be co-opted by secular institutions, thus rendering our obsession with what God knows and cares about more or less irrelevant. ~ Anonymous

BJ Novak gets the Perseverance Award for graduating from Harvard and being unemployed for the entire plane ride to Los Angeles. ~ Andy Kindler

Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don't do that. Asian women don't do that. Only fucking black and Latina women. Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit. ~ Junot Diaz

My favorite magazine is the 'Harvard Business Review.' If someone sat across from me in a restaurant and didn't know me, that might surprise them. ~ Sophia Amoruso

The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960. ~ Charles Murray

You cannot write an accurate history of The Holocaust without accounting for the Harvard students and professors that help make the science an acceptable world-wide movement. ~ A.E. Samaan

I was so attracted to him I could have peed myself right there on the spot, but I hadn't done anything like that in a while. I was older now, and harnessed my feelings in moments like these by opening and closing my fists very rapidly. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact. ~ David Halberstam

Based on my study of Harvard undergraduates, the average number of romantic relationships over four years is less than one. The average number of sexual partners, if you're curious, is 0.5 per student. (I have no idea what 0.5 sexual partners means, but it sounds like the scientific equivalent of second base.) In my survey, I found that among these brilliant Harvard students, 24 percent are unaware if they are currently involved in any romantic relationship. What ~ Shawn Achor

One of the powerful functions of a library - any library - lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all humanity.
[Browsing in the Western Stacks, Harvard Library Bulletin NS 6(3): 27-33, 1995] ~ Richard F. Thomas

He nods, quiet for a moment. "I applied to Brown, Cornell and Harvard. I was accepted to all three. I ended up at Harvard because they had the best rowing program."

Damn. Of course he's a rower. I have a bit of a thing for rowers. Sophomore year I dated two of them. Not at the same time or anything. But still, it was a good year. ~ Jana Aston

60 advocates of unorthodox therapies whose credentials are given in the ACS book (above).( Of these 60, thirty-nine or almost two-thirds, hold ... medical degrees from such universities as Harvard, Illinois, Northwestern, Yale, Dublin, Oxford, or Toronto. Two are osteopaths. 3 ... also hold ... (PhD's) ... scientific ... reputable ... 8 others received PhD's in such fields as chemistry, physiology, bacteriology, parasitology, or medical physics, from ... Yale, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, Columbia, and NYU. Thus over 75% ... are medical doctors or doctors of philosophy in scientific areas. ~ Ralph W. Moss

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

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

There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence. ~ Christine Jennings

Toke a lid, smoke a lid, pop the mescalino! ...Hop a hill! Pop a pill! For old Tim Benzedrino! ~ The Harvard Lampoon

I was always a huge fan of E. E. Cummings. He did a series of lectures at Harvard or Princeton, and they were recorded. And they were incredibly moving. ~ Steve Martin

meantime, here is a list of degrees for five of the nerdiest writers: J. STEWART BURNS BS Mathematics, Harvard University MS Mathematics, UC Berkeley DAVID S. COHEN BS Physics, Harvard University MS Computer Science, UC Berkeley AL JEAN BS Mathematics, Harvard University KEN KEELER BS Applied Mathematics, Harvard University PhD Applied Mathematics, Harvard University JEFF WESTBROOK BS Physics, Harvard University PhD Computer Science, Princeton University ~ Simon Singh

A 2006 Harvard University study shows that entrepreneurs who have failed in their previous enterprise have an almost one-in-five chance of success in their next start-up ~ Dan Senor

You should have seen the costumes for the last few prom themes: Pimps and their srteet ho's; CEOs and their office ho's; GI Joes and their combat ho's; Gardeners and their garden hose;Firemen and their fire hose ... If you ask me, a 'masquerade' theme isn't flattering for anyones features, nor does it define the apppropriate gender roles very clearly. ~ The Harvard Lampoon

When I look at what I'm doing today, I see [the] roots in my college life. I was the online editor of my college paper and an active member of the Harvard Computer Society. I abandoned a summer internship at the Washington Post due to injury and instead did theatre. I found my comedic voice through satirical newsletters in college. ~ Baratunde Thurston

Although champagne was served, the mood was curiously subdued. After this reunion, they would probably never meet together as a class again - at least not in such numbers. They would spend the next decades reading obituaries of the men who had started out in 1954 as rivals and today were leaving Harvard as brothers. This was the beginning of the end. They had met once more and just had time enough to learn that they liked one another. And to say goodbye. ~ Erich Segal

Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States. ~ Jorge Paulo Lemann

We are making sure that the courses we offer at MITx and HarvardX are quintessential MIT and Harvard courses. They are not watered down. They are not MIT Lite or Harvard Lite. These are hard courses. These are the exact same courses, so the certificate will mean something. ~ Anant Agarwal

Let me tell you, very frankly, when I went to the Harvard Business School I was more or less a committed socialist. ~ P. Chidambaram

One of the ways to be happy, to be truly happy, is to contribute to a cause that is greater than yourself. And, through Harvard-based research, we can see that happy people live longer. ~ Sheryl WuDunn

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

You looked at Stanford or Harvard, or the University of Colorado, these were powerful engines just turning out people ready to create and grow businesses. ~ John Hickenlooper

Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist and educator at the University of Chicago, wrote one of the most perceptive articles about education in the aftermath of Sputnik. He observed that while liberal policymakers urged racial integration they simultaneously favored intellectual segregation. Writing in Commentary in 1958, he said that northern white liberals wanted to obliterate the color line while replacing it with a hierarchical caste system based on intelligence. The movement to the suburbs was one way to ensure that their own children had a leg up on everyone. But gifted programs (and the new Advanced Placement programs in high school) promised middle- and upper-class whites (and some blacks who made it out of poverty) greater access to the highest-quality education. Despite all the Jeffersonian talk about how talented inhered in all classes, the poor were unlikely to benefit from gifted programs or the new curriculum projects. A new caste system was in the making, parodied so brilliantly in Michael Young's 1958 fantasy, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Bettelheim sarcastically asked why elite liberals were so worried. "Have these so-called gifted been winding up in the coal mines, have so few of them managed to enter Harvard, Yale, City College, or the University of Chicago? ~ William J. Reese