Stanford University Quotes

Broad-Based Education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

- Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005 ~ George Beahm

In a now famous commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs urged the graduating class to "stay hungry. Stay foolish." Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas, new experiences, and new adventures. Compete with yourself, not with others. Judge yourself on what is your personal best and you'll accomplish more than you could ever have imagined. Life stops for no one, so keep moving. Stay awake and stay alive. ~ Sophia Amoruso

My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge. ~ Erik Larson

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. ~ Steve Jobs

Later, at Stanford University, I thought I'd become a lawyer or businessman, but my father came to me and said he thought there was a big future in the fine-wine business. ~ Robert Mondavi

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

After high school, I went to Stanford University and majored in English. Of course, that gave me a chance to do lots more reading and writing. I also received degrees in London and Dublin - where I moved to be near a charming Irishman who became my husband! ~ Linda Sue Park

I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University. ~ Kathryn Harrison

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. ~ Steve Jobs

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 ~ Epictetus

Begin to live each day as if it was your last. ~ Robin Sharma

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world? ~ Steve Jobs

Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley workstation maker, got its start in 1982 making such machines for use on the Stanford University Network (hence its name). Sun set a record that still stands in the annals of American business for being the company that from a dead start reached the $1 billion sales mark faster than any other manufacturer - it took all of four years. ~ Brent Schlender

For the last year I've been at Stanford University as a student and I've had time to read the newspaper. ~ Tabitha Soren

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. ~ Steve Jobs

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way. ~ Mark Steyn

Seventy-five percent of students visiting the Cowell Health Center at Stanford University describe themselves as "sexually active. ~ James C. Dobson

My first web series, 'Dorm Diaries,' was a realistic mockumentary about what it was like to be black at Stanford University. I'm black and I went to Stanford. Boom. Easy. ~ Issa Rae

One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford University. In 2006, he wrote in the journal Nature about the bias he had experienced as a woman in the sciences, from losing fellowships to less qualified male candidates to being told a boyfriend must have helped her with her math. He was told that he was smarter than his sister by a man who confused his former, female self for that sister.
("A Short History of Silence") ~ Rebecca Solnit

Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career, Michael Schwalbe of Stanford University explains why fear gets in the way of luck. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

Madaming is the sort of thing that happens to you - like getting a battlefield commission or becoming the dean of women at Stanford University. ~ Sally Stanford

When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing. ~ Caroline Lawrence

Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University. ~ Ren Ng

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns.
For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering. ~ Jaron Lanier

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005] ~ Steve Jobs

The Allied governments, for example, with the British as executors, maintained in place the food blockade of Germany that had been in effect since 1917. A British authority would note that "in the last two years of the war, nearly 800,000 noncombatants died in Germany from starvation or diseases attributed to undernourishment. The biggest mortality was among children between the ages of 5 and 1 5, where the death rate increased by 55 percent. . . a whole generation [the one which had been born and lived during Hitler's rise to power] grew up in an epoch of undernourishment and misery such as we [British] have never in this country experienced."3 A distinguished American authority on United States foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century, Stanford University professor Thomas A. Bailey, noted that "the Allied slow starvation of Germany's civilian population was quiet, unspectacular, and censored."4 The Englishman Gilbert Murray, writing in 1933, noted that future historians would probably regard the establishment and continuation of the blockade as one of those many acts of almost incredible inhumanity which made World War I conspicuous in history.
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 122 ~ Russel H.S. Stolfi

We have a government that boasts about free education. Those of us who have scratched below the surface know it is costing us by denying opportunities for others to attend college or university. ~ Johann Lamont

The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them. ~ Ivan Illich

The Ohio State University has a rich - if quiet - heritage of the arts. ~ Gordon Gee

If the U.S. government and nonprofit organizations, private corporations and university laboratories are going to dedicate money and time to the future, they also need to do so for the present. They need to fund accessible buses, schools, classrooms, movie theaters, restrooms, housing, and workplaces. They should support campaigns to end bullying, employment discrimination, social isolation, and the ongoing institutionalizing of disabled people with the same enthusiasm with which they implement cure research. I want money for accessible playgrounds, tree houses, and sandboxes so that wheelchair-using kids aren't left twiddling their thumbs in the present while they dream of running in the future.

If we choose to wait for those always-just-around-the-corner cures, lavishing them with resources, energy, and media attention, we risk suspending our present-day lives. ~ Eli Clare

At university I had a big coloured scarf and people would often say, 'All right, Doctor Who?' And, I thought, I rather liked that notion. ~ Matt Smith

Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, has launched a movement to convince people to not go to college.3 It's a waste of money. The return on investment isn't there anymore. School has gotten too expensive. . . If writing [computer] code is your deal and you're able to go to a trade school that enables you to write code, that's far better than a computer science degree from a four-year college or university that looks great on paper, but doesn't give you the skills you need when you graduate. ~ John Dearie

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself. ~ Allan Bloom

Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It's not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It's not that photographers don't want to be famous, it's just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception. ~ Mark Klett

J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, "Littlewood's Miscellany." He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood's Law. ~ David McRaney

Harvard Medical School, the University of South Florida and the American Psychiatric Association have all conducted studies showing that the earlier one begins gambling, the more likely it is he or she will become an addicted, problem gambler. ~ Spencer Bachus

I went to university in the north of England at University of Birmingham to do an English literature degree, and I knew I could do extracurricular stuff with theater and drama. I started a theater company, called Article 19, and I did it with a bunch of friends. I wrote and directed plays. I had a radio show. ~ Tom Riley

David Blunkett and I both take the same view that it is scandalous that someone from North Tyneside, Laura Spence, with the best qualifications and who wants to be a doctor, should be turned down by Oxford University using an interview system more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than justice. It is about time for an end to that old Britain where what matters more are the privileges you are born with, rather than the potential you actually have. ~ Gordon Brown

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university. ~ Colin Wilson

But the Wisconsin tradition meant more than a simple belief in the people. It also meant a faith in the application of intelligence and reason to the problems of society. It meant a deep conviction that the role of government was not to stumble along like a drunkard in the dark, but to light its way by the best torches of knowledge and understanding it could find. ~ Adlai Stevenson

The exuberant Husky crew gingerly hoisted Walling out of the shell and sent him off to the hospital. Astonished fans and journalists gathered around them on the dock, peppering them with questions: Was the University of Washington in the District of Columbia? Where exactly was Seattle, anyway? Were any of them really lumberjacks? ~ Daniel James Brown

In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. ~ James Henry Breasted

You know, I didn't get to go to university because I've been acting since I was a kid. ~ Isla Fisher

My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly. ~ Joan Baez

I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard. ~ Joseph Stiglitz

It was a big surprise when I started to get attention in Sweden, going from biochemistry studies to touring and living from music only. There were a couple of years while I went to university when I was OK with thinking of music as just a nice recreation. ~ Jose Gonzalez

I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I've seen recently - they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I've read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don't remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else - simply nothingness. ~ Jonas Mekas

Patronizing the Arts is a brilliantly nuanced assessment of why universities must become art patrons. Learning from the twentieth-century university's embrace of Big Science, Garber argues that twenty-first-century universities must rigorously devote their attention to Big Art. Provocative, witty, and layered, Patronizing the Arts cogently demonstrates the advantages for both art and the university in this new and radical alliance. ~ Peggy Phelan

I liked Edinburgh as a university in a way that I'd never enjoyed King's College London. I realised after I came to Edinburgh that perhaps it was a mistake to have gone to a college which was bang in the centre of a vast city. It had a bad effect on the social life of the students because a lot of them were commuting from outer London. ~ Peter Higgs

Warwick Castle, Oxford University, the Cotswold, and the countryside of England are my favorite places to visit when I'm in England. Whenever I visit, I feel as if I've come home. These places inspired my settings for my fantasy series, Bitter Frost Series, Wordwick Games, and The Alchemists Academy. I didn't know the great author of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was also inspired by Warwick, Oxford, and Cotswold. Imaginative minds must dream alike. ~ Kailin Gow

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

The University of Nebraska says that elderly people that drink beer or wine at least four times a week have the highest bone density. They need it - they're the ones falling down the most. ~ Jay Leno

I graduated from the University of Whatever. ~ Dana Snyder

And you send people to jails. When they enter, they are amateur; when they come out, they have graduated from the university. All that your laws and your jails teach the criminals is one thing: that committing a crime is not a crime, but being caught is a crime. ~ Osho

In a condition of society and under an industrial organization which places labor completely at the mercy of capital, the accumulations of capital will necessarily be rapid, and an unequal distribution of wealth is at once to be observed. ~ Leland Stanford

To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist - in his own phrase, a "utopian Socialist." He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

We must have a university degree even if we never get a job in the area of knowledge we were forced to study. ~ Paulo Coelho

In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie