A Quote by Mary Beard
In real life, Oxford and Cambridge are two excellent universities, like many others in the country. They are full of highly intelligent, hard-working, and quite ordinary students and teachers.
Related Quotes
My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
Once the troops move into Cambodia, the colleges and universities of this country were on the verge of civil war. Many closed down. The students were up in arms. And it looked very much like there were going to be real problems in this country.
Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.
Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.
Once I was asked to do celebrity rowing, where they taught people who had been to Oxford or Cambridge to row against each other. That sounded like too much hard work: really early mornings and having to be quite fit, which I'm not.
My whole life has been basically trying to find intelligent students or, you know, highly motivated students and giving them an opportunity to do good science.
My parents didn't go to university and weren't brought up in England. They hadn't heard of any other universities other than 'Cambridge' or 'Oxford.'
Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.
There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm…Second, there are the hard- working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard- working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.
Oxford is a funny place, as it is a mixture of town and gown. You have the students at the main university and at Oxford Brookes, but there is also a big working-class community.
The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
In high performing countries, principals are working with highly qualified teachers who come from the top tiers of the graduation range, who have been rigorously prepared in universities and through supervised practice in schools, and who remain in education for all of their careers.
What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it.
An intelligent man, a man who has a little meditative consciousness, can make his life a beautiful piece of art, can make it so full of love and full of music and full of poetry and full of dance that there are no limitations for it. Life is not hard. It is man's stupidity that makes it hard.
Karan Thapar is an endangered species. They don't make them like him anymore. True, thousands have gone to the Doon Valley School after him, as indeed to Oxford and Cambridge universities. But Karan Thapar is more than the sum of his upbringing. He's a gentleman journalist.
