Burden Quote by Neal Stephenson

What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?

— Terry Pratchett

“He did not understand—until it was too late—what one university president called the reality of tenured faculty: “A thousand points of no.”

— James C. Collins

I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now…

— Jon Krakauer

“Thus he started his education, that marvelous, growing, aching process whereby a mind develops into a usable instrument with a collection of proved experience…

— James A. Michener

“He had, in fact, already begun to sink into that creeping dry rot of pedagogy which is the worst and ultimate pitfall of the…

— James Hilton

“He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life…

— Ayn Rand

“he had been trying for years to get his graduate students to use such playful investigation rather than rote learning and mechanical thinking in…

— Stuart Brown

His great passion for education and [making sure] people have an opportunity. Of course that's what came out of the George Mitchell Institute and…

— Barbara Mikulski

“He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The…

— Anonymous

“Didn't it bother him that he was teaching his students poetry when he was certain it wouldn't make a difference in how their lives…

— Jenny Zhang

When asked what learning was the most necessary, he said, “Not to unlearn what you have learned!”

— Diogenes Laertius

Phil Gramm had a stump speech about how his mother's devotion kept him from being an academic failure in life. She got him into…

— Gail Collins