British Academic Quotes

Harold Laski

Terry Eagleton

Edward Carpenter

Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet

Susan Blackmore

Ken Robinson

Adam Roberts

A period of high civilization is one in which thoughts fly freely from mind to mind, from one country to another-yes, from the past into the present.

The number of substitutes for fine and clean thinking the world provides positively gnaws at one's vitals.

Fighting terrorism is like being a goalkeeper. You can make a hundred brilliant saves but the only shot that people remember is the one that gets past you.

Paul Wilkinson (political scientist)

To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart.

William Macneile Dixon

Chase him down the alley
put him behind bars
in a basement and charge him rent.

Wyrd existed before the Gods and will exist after them. Yet wyrd lasts only for an instant, because it is the constant creation of the forces. Wyrd is itself, constant change, like the seasons, yet because it is created at every instant it is unchanging, like the still center of a whirlpool.
The pattern of wyrd is like the grain in wood, or the flow of a stream, it is never repeated in exactly the same way. But the threads of wyrd pass through all things and we can open ourselves to its pattern by observing the ripples as it passes by.

We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.

When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.

Extra-marital sex is as overrated as pre-marital sex. And marital sex, come to think of it.

Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse.

Hazel Henderson

It is difficult to be humble. Even if you aim at humility, there is no guarantee that when you have attained the state you will not be proud of the feat.

Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Hangeul must unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.

Geoffrey Sampson

Sometimes the last thing learners need is for their preferred learning style to be affirmed. Agreeing to let people learn only in a way that feels comfortable and familiar can restrict seriously their chance for development.

Stephen Brookfield

It is difficult, almost impossible, to find the book from which something either valuable or amusing may not be found, if the proper alembic be applied.

John Hill Burton

As far as I am concerned, Scotland will be reborn when the last minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post.

The rules of the world are changing. It is time for the rules of teaching and teachers' work to change with them.

Andy Hargreaves (academic)

Nothing is more certain than that worlds on worlds, and spheres on spheres, stretch behind and beyond the actually seen.

Edward Carpenter

Last night, among his fellow roughs,
He jested, quaffed, and swore;
A drunken private of the Buffs,
Who never looked before.
Today, beneath the foeman's frown,
He stands in Elgin's place,
Ambassador from Britain's crown,
And type of all her race.

Francis Hastings Doyle

The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.

Henry Chadwick (theologian)

A soul eager for new mastery and ever looking forward cares little to dwell upon the past.

Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Susan Blackmore

These differences in moral vision and map-making bred, In turn, conflicting institutional needs and social policies, within the constraints of an under-developed economy and society in terms of Western standards. Though both were 'backward-looking', the hierarchical and theocratic Byzantine ideal with its cultural affinity to Orthodox Tsarism, lent itself to a rural and patriarchal society whose political institutions would be subordinated to the religious controls of the clergy and their supporters among the notables; their suspicions of the West would be compensated by the eastward drive inherent in the Megali Idea and its dream of a restored Byzantine empire in Anatolia and the Aegean. Whereas the Hellenic vision,

Anthony D. Smith

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

Theories are more common than achievements in the history of education.

Richard Livingstone