Harvard Quotes

“My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

“If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”
― Dorothy Parker, While Rome Burns

“We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters

“The religious kids were really religious, the kind who push religion on others in a way that always freaks me out. They are like people who keep telling me, 'You have to see Hamilton!' Honestly, no I don't and the more you keep telling me, the less likely I am to actually see it. Though I have subsequently seen, "Hamilton" and it's excellent.”
― Colin Jost, A Very Punchable Face

“I am a one-trick pony, unable to comfort with anything other than grades.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“That’s what Harvard was like: thinking you’re pretty good at something, then meeting someone who is really good or even one of the best in the world. And that doesn’t mean they get good grades. A lot of the most famous alumni left without graduating because their work became more important than school. People like Bill Gates, Matt Damon, and Mark Zuckerberg. And you know who did graduate? The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The point is: Never graduate from Harvard.”
― Colin Jost, A Very Punchable Face

“How do you know they both went to Harvard?

Mom smiles. 'It's like with vegans, sweetheart. They tell you.”
― Katie Henry, This Will Be Funny Someday

“All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“I guess even smart students gossips just like regular people.”
― Vann Chow, Shanghai Nobody

“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

“Our lives begin in the everyday and stay in the everyday. Only in the everyday can we begin to create truly great worlds.”
― Michael Puett, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life

“Harvard has now de facto become a Chinese outpost.”
― Thorsten J. Pattberg

“I care a lot about people finding their own path, and I think the world’s a better place if we let people figure out their passions and what they’re good at and give them the knowledge and skills to do that, but our education system isn’t designed to do that — it rounds you out and makes you interchangeable with everyone else.”
― Todd Rose

“While at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Tony found himself to be a complete outlier. He was almost constantly at odds with the mainstream of education. He is the first to admit that a doctorate from Harvard is important largely because everyone thinks it’s important.
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― Tony Wagner, Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era

“Jordan B. Peterson says self-esteem doesn’t exist… and that SE training mostly results in narcissism. Jack Canfield says he wrote his first book about it. And guess what? They’ve BOTH been to Harvard! What are we to do in this confusing world? I started going to AA meetings and people there tell you to find a loving God… and then to get a job at the Kroger… Something’s wrong with this picture. If self-esteem exists, and I pray to God that it does, I cannot possibly find a job that will pay me enough money without undermining the dignity of my work, after all this Spirituality, and Sobriety, and Self Esteem & Therapy I've accumulated.... don't make me laugh. And I’m a bright guy, too. Officially.”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“At Harvard, so the story goes, one of Carter's professors said that Black people had no history.

Carter remembered his father's pride, his mother's courage, and Oliver's determination to learn. He remembered reading the newspaper.

Carter spoke up. "No people lacked a history," he said. The professor challenged Carter to prove him wrong.

For the rest of his life, Carter did just that.”
― Deborah Hopkinson, Carter Reads the Newspaper

“That's a thing I do sometimes-hold fundraisers among people I know for migrants I love who are in need. It's the same people who donate every time, older white hippes and children of immigrants, not my former Harvard classmates who post pictures of themselves at rooftop happy hours every day”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“FDR appointed a eugenic zealot named Isiah Bowman to his "M Project" that kept Jews from the safety of US shores.”
― A.E. Samaan, H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator

“Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper.”
― A.E. Samaan, H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator

“The program is grounded in 10 design principles, the aim of which is to create innovative solutions to intractable health problems....In other words, do not be content with the status quo. The remaining principles include several obvious but often overlooked themes in routine patient care: value each person, be human, be human-centered, codesign, facilitate connections, treat with dignity, and provide a stage from which the hardest, most important stories may be told.”
― Paul Cerrato, Realizing the Promise of Precision Medicine: The Role of Patient Data, Mobile Technology, and Consumer Engagement

“The Penster is a capitalism lens of guiding development of the global civilization of human being; the book is coverage the tension of life.”
― Lawrence Bacow

“In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters.

Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests […] but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“My freshmen seminar professor had warned our class that Harvard was an institution on a scale we could not imagine: "Harvard will change you by the end of your four years, but don't expect to change it." It wouldn't be surprising if an institution that prided itself on being older than the US government might have behaved as though it were accountable only to itself.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“If you really want this acceptance, then you need to display that now. Acceptance into the college of your choice may happen, but it likely won’t happen from mediocrity or luck. Put in the time and effort, do the research, and constantly strive for excellence on a daily basis. This needs to be a fundamental aspect of your mindset as a student.”
― AY Shih, The College Admissions Blueprint: 9 Proven Steps from Application to Acceptance

“He claimed to have attended “Harvard in New York”! Why not in Cambridge? Allston? Boston?”
― Lana M. Rochel, Looking For Your Tribe: Intellectual Poems

“I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“The ancient university breathed a spirit of having been designed by men and for men, as, of course, it was – not for anomalies like ourselves.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“I got a call last week from Harvard. They want me to come to Boston to teach Nonsense 101. I told them I'm 72 ducks, and they don't have a pool big enough to afford me.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes

“I graduated from The University of Florida. I tell people it's The Harvard of Gainesville.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes