I approached the idea of college with the expectation of taking part in an intellectual feast… In college, in some way that I devoutly believed in but could not explain, I expected to become a person.
College Quotes
(Mencken is reviewing the essays which were submitted to the Mercury’s college competition.) The student body, seen through the eyes of the essayists, came out almost as badly as the faculty. Life at an American college has plainly become more or less uncomfortable to a young man or woman of active and eager mind… What […]
Such works as Milton’s “Areopagitica” and Mill’s “Liberty” are not used as text-books in the American colleges. Surely that is asking far too much. Who could imagine a pedagogue honestly believing in liberty? If he did his life would be one long stultification, for he lives in a world in which he has no rights […]
Seniors graduate from high school over the next few weeks. Many will expand their education with advanced learning and mentoring with very bright people. Others will go to college.
Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.
A college education was for me life-changing. It gave me a life-long passion for reading and learning. It challenged my narrowness and parochialism – really forced open my mind. It deepened my commitment to culture in general and to the higher forms of pleasure. Thus it enriched my life – permanently – by confirming me […]
Enter by this gateway and seek the way of honor, the light of truth, the will to work for men.
At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
College is like a fountain of knowledge – and the students are there to drink.
