Liberal Arts Majors Quotes

A new report says ISIS is trying to recruit professionals like doctors, engineers, and accountants. Sorry, kids, even ISIS says they're not hiring liberal arts majors. ~ Conan O'Brien

A liberal arts education teaches you how to think - I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way. ~ Stephen King

To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance. Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry him if he had merely read so many useless works. ~ Seneca.

Important insights ought never to be limited to the group from which may arise. ~ Richard J. Foster

Cezanne is one of the most liberal artists I have ever seen ... he grants that everyone may be as honest and as true to nature from their convictions; he doesn't believe that everyone should see alike. ~ Mary Cassatt

What are the liberal arts and sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued disinterestedly - that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical benefit. Disinterestedness doesn't mean that the professor is equally open to any view. Professors are hired because they have views about their subjects, views that exclude opposing or alternative views. Disinterestedness just means that whatever views a professor does hold, they have been arrived at unconstrained, or as unconstrained as possible, by anything except the requirement of honesty. ~ Louis Menand

She dresses like she's the dean of a small liberal arts college, and she probably could be. Not only does she relish following the rules, but she's also the only one who even knows what they are. ~ Val Emmich

When we introduce new technologies into our classrooms we are teaching our students twice. ~ Michael Joseph Brown

Classical education was based on the seven liberal arts or sciences: grammar, the formal structures of language; rhetoric, composition and presentation of argument; dialectic, formal logic; arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy.14 For centuries, the classics dominated the very idea of being educated and attempts at reform were resisted. ~ Ken Robinson

We're not so different, you and I. Sure, we may have different religious beliefs, political outlooks, sexual orientations, economic viewpoints, and artistic/literary/culinary tastes, but deep down we both want the same thing: To be loved by a beautiful being of light riding a glowing unicorn who just got named the dean of Liberal Arts at Harvard University (The unicorn's the new dean, not the being of light), and it wants you to come up to Boston to teach Sexual Intercourse 101 to a select group of freshmen specifically chosen by you. ~ Jarod Kintz

You parents can provide no better gift for your children than an education in the liberal arts. House and home burn down, but an education is easy to carry along. ~ Martin Luther

I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience. ~ Mandy Patinkin

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free. ~ William Deresiewicz

I'd had the quintessential liberal arts experience, and I came out of college not having a clue of what to do. ~ John Wesley

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue, but merely set it going in that direction. ~ Seneca.

I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world. ~ Steve Case

Studying the liberal arts is an intransitive activity; the effects of studying these arts stays within the individual and perfects the faculties of the mind and spirit. The study of liberal arts is like the blooming of a rose; it brings to fruition the possibilities of human nature. The utilitarian or servile arts enable one to be a servant - of another person, of the state, of a corporation, or of a business - and to earn a living. The liberal arts, in contrast, teach one how to live; they train the faculties and bring them to perfection; they enable a person to rise above his material environment to live an intellectual, a rational, and therefore a free life in gaining truth. ~ Miriam Joseph

Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it? ~ Pamela Dean

Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel. ~ Ovid

Unless you took courses in architecture, engineering, or pre-med, the rest of your liberal arts education hardly prepares you for life as the business warrior and champion you envision yourself to be. ~ Gene Simmons

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside of me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head. What you don't yet know are the stakes of this struggle. In the twenty years since my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand these stakes, and to see that the liberal arts cliche about "teaching you how to think" was actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth. "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. ~ David Foster Wallace

He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature. ~ Jon Meacham

It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership
leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status
Steve Jobs
recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets. ~ Damon Horowitz

I have not been able to give a concrete answer to the question of how the nations of Asia can create their own unique liberal arts traditions that are not simply the importation of a Western model. The question is a critical one and the answer must come from Asian universities themselves. ~ Henry Rosovsky

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. ~ Steve Jobs

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it's all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a "useful" or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results. ~ Henry Doss

I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified. ~ Eugene McCarthy

When a liberal professor takes enormous intellectual liberties by openly promoting an ideological agenda to his students, the cry of academic freedom rings across the quads. But when a conservative professor is punished for publishing an article in a politically incorrect journal, there is no defense of intellectual diversity. What is billed as academic neutrality turns out to be a smoke screen for the relativistic liberal agenda.

Today's relativists could not have gotten away with their double standards in a culture that prized truth. But a gradual, sustained assault on truth has been carried out through the soft underbelly of Western culture: the arts. In film, music, and television, the themes of sensual pleasure and individual choice have drowned out the tried-and-true virtues of faith, family, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, patriotism, and fidelity in marriage. Cultural mechanics have wielded their tools to dull the public's sense of reasonable limits. In an Age of Consent, the silly and the profound are becoming indistinguishable. ~ Gary L. Bauer

What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides. ~ Felix Rohatyn

The popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation. ~ Wendy Brown

'Tis certain that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions in which true virtue and honor consist. It rarely, very rarely happens that a man of taste and learning is not, at least, an honest man, whatever frailties may attend him. ~ David Hume

One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is. ~ Marilynne Robinson

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it," [John] Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantage. ~ Fareed Zakaria

Man, he could sell. As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it because I spent hours in conversation with him over the 14 years he ran Apple. ~ Walt Mossberg

The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic. ~ Lorenzo Ghiberti

My husband and I were excited about having a kid - it was having a baby that had us worried. We had a lot to learn, so like good liberal arts graduates, we signed up for a class. ~ Chelsea Cain

As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports. ~ Henry Giroux

Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and it is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The impotence of liberal humanism is a symptom of its essentially contradictory relationship to modern capitalism. For although it forms part of the 'official' ideology of such society, and the 'humanities' exist to reproduce it, the social order within which it exists has in one sense very little time for it at all. Who is concerned with the uniqueness of the individual, the imperishable truths of the human condition or the sensuous textures of lived experience in the Foreign Office or the boardroom of Standard Oil? Capitalism's reverential hat-tipping to the arts is obvious hypocrisy, except when it can hang them on its walls as a sound investment. Yet capitalist states have continued to direct funds into higher education humanities departments, and though such departments are usually the first in line for savage cutting when capitalism enters on one of its periodic crises, it is doubtful that it is only hypocrisy, a fear of appearing in its true philistine colours, which compels this grudging support. The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster. The 'unique individual' is indeed important when it comes to defending the business entrepreneur's right to make profit while throwing men and women out of work; the individual must at all costs have the 'right to choose', provided this means the right to buy one's child an expensive private education while other children are depri ~ Terry Eagleton