There is not the slightest probability that the college will foster an eminent talent in any youth. If he refuse prayers and recitations, they will torment and traduce and expel him, though he were Newton or Dante.
College Quotes
The chief value in going to college is that it’s the only way to learn it really doesn’t matter.
I learned a lot in college, the very least of it in the classrooms. I learned how to kiss a girl and put on a rubber at the same time (a necessary but often overlooked skill), how to chug a sixteen-ounce can of beer without throwing up, how to make extra cash in my spare […]
The old college is no doubt gone and we could not bring it back if we would. But it would perhaps be well for us if we could keep alive something of the intimate and friendly spirit that inspired it.
Colleges don’t make fools, they only develop them.
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.
(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.
