Stuffy Academics Quotes

We are 'tribals,' Yadeen and me from the Thak heartland, and Hulak, from the grass country north of Jindazhen," she told him. "We use the magic taught by our tribes and academic magic. Book magic. The masters who sneer are too blind to realize the gods and the immortals use no books. They think tribal magic is on the same level as hedge-witchery. They will mock you and do their best to shut you out of their oh-so-learned circles if you admit to taking other magics seriously. Lindhall is all right, and your other teachers. But be careful around the likes of Chioké and Girisunika. If you want to move up in Carthak, you stay clean of the stain of tribal magic. ~ Tamora Pierce

In the early 1990s, a group of people accused of sexual abuse formed the 'False Memory Syndrome Foundation' (FMSF). The FMSF's primary goal was to advocate on behalf of parents accused of child sexual abuse by their adult children, but the Foundation also became an important resource for people accused of sexual abuse by minors. Importantly, the Foundation attracted academics from a range of discliplines whose experise had been contested or challenged by the legitimisation of children's and women's testimony of sexual abuse. ~ Michael Salter

Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers. ~ Simon Schama

Some period pieces are shot slightly objectively, a little bit, and some call it stuffy or dusty or old fashioned. I always felt that some of the films that I admire the most are the ones where they're intimate with the characters. ~ Nikolaj Arcel

You have to be equal at both - great at football and great at dedicating yourself to the academics at Notre Dame. It's hard. There are no rooty-toot classes for athletes in South Bend. ~ Justin Tuck

What to do? We yanked the dress up over her lovely attributes and with the addition of a scarf, the problem was solved. Sorry, guys, blame that stuffy censor. He hated surprises. ~ Audrey Meadows

I've always thought academics should get a little slurry on their boots from time to time. ~ Karen Lord

When academics claim a topic is obsolete, they mean merely they are tired of flogging it with their cliches. ~ Kenny Smith

The argument in this book is that religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform. Non-doctrinal factors - such as the Saudis' use of oil revenues to fund Wahhabism and Western support for the Saudi regime - are important, but religious doctrine is more important. Hard as it may be for many Western academics to believe, when people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are not trying somehow to dignify their underlying socioeconomic or political grievances. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Scientists and academics in particular focus on detail and the minutiae. When they talk to each other, they usually don't focus on the broad ideas; they don't focus on social interconnectedness. They focus on the task that they're doing. ~ Aaron D. O'Connell

A big part of my life is music education because it changed my life - but arts, academics and athletics should all be equally treated in the school. ~ Flea

There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand. ~ Lawrence Lessig

Read,read,read! It is good and promotes better academics. It helps in all sorts of ways. So read no matter what! ~ Jennifer

One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between "concepts." There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience... Sociology - by its very nature? - seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died ~ Peter Elbow

You think about D.C. as a boring stuffy place. That's kind of its image. But if you grow up in that, you see all these energetic, fun people and crazy stuff that happens behind the scenes that no one knows about. ~ Kristin Gore

Make your copy straightforward to read, understand and use. Use easy words; those that are used for everyday speech. Use phrases that are not too imprecise and very understandable. Do not be too stuffy; remove pompous words and substitute them with plain words. Minimize complicated gimmicks and constructions. If you can't give the data directly and briefly, you must consider writing the copy again. ~ Jay Abraham

Can they do both? That's a huge balance, I think, with kids- trying to find the right- it's everything, you know, it's social life, it's academics, it's sports. ~ Joan Cusack

The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics. ~ Zadie Smith

Academics are not intellectuals; they are not curious, they build their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stay securely in them. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty - it makes them indispensable - ~ Clive James

People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s. ~ Peter Jackson

To understand why I jumped from the Mormon wagon train requires an understanding of what Mormons are and how they think. While Mormons have some quaint, quirky and fanatical ideas, they really aren't much different from millions of poor, guilt-ridden souls who, throughout the march of human history, have hitched their hopes to mass movements of one sort or another. Eric Hoffer, in his brilliant treatise, "The True Believer," explains the attraction of joining a cause: "A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following 'by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated by freeing them from their ineffectual selves--and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole'. "Of all the cults and philosophies that competed in the Graeco-Roman world, Christianity alone developed from its inception a compact organization."

Once I realized this, it wasn't much of a leap out of religion altogether once I flew the Mormon coop. I simply wanted to be free from organizational groupthink. I escaped from the stuffy attic of religion's "pray, pay and obey" mentality into journalism's open laboratory of "who, what, where, when and why. ~ Steve Benson

His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist. ~ Norman Mailer

Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. ~ Roger Lowenstein

Often, we think that things are the way they are because of intelligent design - because somebody super-smart, or some group of academics, came up with the best system ever to do XYZ. Actually, things are often the way they are because of an accident of history. ~ Leila Janah

I served the famous professors and scholars, and eventually they learned that the Reverend Moon is superior to them. Even Nobel laureate academics who thought they were at the center of knowledge are as nothing in front of me. ~ Sun Myung Moon

Perhaps because my father never got a college degree himself, he continued to view people who had one with a respect that bordered on awe. In most cases they didn't deserve it. My father could run circles around most academics and he would have done very well in college, if he'd been able to go. ~ Donald J. Trump

She'd pulled back her hair to air her neck, just for one second, fanning her flushed cheeks by flapping her other hand. She'd smiled at him and pulled a face at how hot and stuffy the bar was. Miles had thought she was beautiful, the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, and if you'd told him, in that minute, that he'd be in this beautiful creature's bed tonight, or that in seven years' time he'd be waiting for her at the top of the aisle, he could never have believed you. ~ Erin Lawless

Emil and Jack established rival claims to a certain thick patch, and while they were squabbling about, Stuffy quickly and quietly stripped the bushes and fled to the protection of Dan ~ Louisa May Alcott

I had good intentions once upon a time. Well, September. ~ Claire Hennessy

In this business, I find more value in working with hackers who abstract new realities from cast aside code and concepts than academics who regurgitate other people's work and try to pawn it off as their own. ~ James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute For Critical Infrastructure Technology

Being an adult doesn't mean you're suddenly stuffy and boring - it just means you're a little more responsible, a little more considerate. Well, that's my definition of what being an adult means. And I'm always right, so, ya know, that's what it is. ~ Lindy Zart

Of course, not everybody likes camping trips. I do not myself enjoy them much, because I'm not outdoorsy, or at any rate, I'm not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-matress-wise. There's a limit to the outdoorsiness to which some academics can be expected to submit. ~ Gerald A. Cohen

The inside of the house – with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes to artfully shadowed as to appear bars – was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about "people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet." Intending to parody society's obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: "I don't think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error. ~ Danah Boyd

How could two teams of scientists come to such obviously contradictory conclusions on seemingly every point that matters in the debate over global warming? There are many reasons why scientists disagree, the subject, by the way, of an excellent book a couple years ago titled Wrong by David H. Freedman. A big reason is IPCC is producing what academics call "post-normal science" while NIPCC is producing old-fashioned "real science. ~ Joseph L. Bast

Parents naturally want their children to excel in every area of academics and extra-curricular activities, but the reality is- God made each child differently for His purpose. He never intended for our children to excel in everything. ~ Tamara L. Chilver

I love academics, theory and all that. I love and admire that and try to do as much reading as I can. ~ Anton Yelchin

If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom. ~ Carl Sagan

October, the urban anthropologist will say, tapping his foot steadily, we are sociologists, not politicians. We are academics, not charity workers. Life is a phenomenon. ~ Amanda Lee Koe

A pyramid of souls exists, based on the desire to receive. At the base of the pyramid are many souls with small desires, earthly, looking for a comfortable life in an animal-like manner: food, sex, sleep. The next layer comprises fewer souls, those with the urge to acquire wealth. These are people who are willing to invest their entire lives in making money, and who sacrifice themselves for the sake of being rich.

Next are those that will do anything to control others, to govern and reach positions of power. An even greater desire, felt by even fewer souls, is for knowledge; these are scientists and academics, who spend their lives engaged in discovering something specific. They are interested in nothing but their all-important discovery.

Located at the zenith of the pyramid is the strongest desire, developed by only a small few, for the attainment of the spiritual world. All these levels are built into the pyramid. ~ Michael Laitman

I stop listening when academics start mixing their Greek and Latin roots. That never leads anywhere productive. ~ Theodora Goss

He sat down and played again that piece of Scriabin's that Lydia thought he played so badly, and as he began he had a sudden recollection of that stuffy, smoky cellar to which she had taken him, of those roughs he had made such friends with, and of the Russian woman, gaunt and gipsy-skinned, with her enormous eyes, who had sung those wild, barbaric songs with such a tragic abandon. Through the notes he struck he seemed to hear her raucous, harsh and yet deeply moving voice. Leslie Mason had a sensitive ear. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

An idea is only an idea if it causes unease, debate and reflection. By that standard, Thomas Homer-Dixon's concept of an 'ingenuity gap' is truly a new idea. I can think of no other new concept that so fully condenses all of the challenges we face as a human civilization than the 'ingenuity gap'. Homer-Dixon has found a way to unite all of our concerns about economics, war, population growth, complexity, etc. under a single heading. He is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a mass audience. ~ Robert D. Kaplan

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Homosexuality is not 'normal' On the contrary it is a challenge to the norm ... Nature exists whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction ... No one is born gay. The idea is ridiculous ... homosexuality is an adaptation, not an inborn trait ... ~ Camille Paglia

The "old school" of wastewater treatment, still embraced by most government regulators and many academics, considers water to be a vehicle for the routine transfer of waste from on place to another. It also considers the accompanying organic material to be of little or no value. The "new school", on the other hand, sees water as a dwindling, precious resource that should not be polluted with waste; organic materials are seen as resources that should be constructively recycled. My research for this chapter included reviewing hundreds of research papers on alternative wastewater systems. I was amazed at the incredible amount of time and money that has gone into studying how to clean the water we have polluted with human excrement. In all of the research papers, without exception, the idea that we should simply stop defecating in water was never suggested. ~ Joseph Jenkins

That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape
anywhere
for anyone? It was worth murdering a world. ~ Graham Greene