I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it.

— Erin McCarthy

If only we were all better educated. If then, higher education would at last be a journey for skill and knowledge rather than for power and status.

— Criss Jami

If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After a while you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.

— Criss Jami

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

— Claire Hennessy

I have never compromised on academics and the one thing that I insist on is good grades, even though I am a relaxed and indulgent parent in most other things.

— Preeti Shenoy

I'm not one of those academics that don't do shit but reads about it. The difference is, I do shit. I have a proof of concept and it works.

— Ron Finley

... I succeeded at math, at least by the usual evaluation criteria: grades. Yet while I might have earned top marks in geometry and algebra, I was merely following memorized rules, plugging in numbers and dutifully crunching out answers by rote, with no real grasp of the significance of what I was doing or its usefulness in solving real-world problems. Worse, I knew the depth of my own ignorance, and I lived in fear that my lack of comprehension would be discovered, and I would be exposed as an academic fraud -- psychologists call this "imposter syndrome".

— Jennifer Ouellette

I think her favorite thing about our. . . Collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.

— Helen Oyeyemi

It’s the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

— Amanda Craig

It was a time when a degree was expected but not much respected.

— Pawan Mishra