'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.


A college education should equip one to entertain three things: a friend, an idea and oneself.


A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.


A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.


American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.


Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.


College isn't the place to go for ideas.


College-bred is a four-year loaf, using dad's dough, Coming out half-baked, with a lot of crust.


Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.


Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!


I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best — it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money — provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.


I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.


I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them — the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.


I had always imagined that ClichT was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford.


I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.


I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.


I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.


If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means — from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.


If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? — not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?


In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.

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