Top 711 Ivory Tower Quotes & Sayings

Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

That's a big part of being a designer now: going out, having dinners, meeting people. Being in an ivory tower, you can feel very removed.

We look down on our scientists if they engage in outside consultation. We implicitly promote the ivory tower.

I know everybody. I make friends easily. I'm a gregarious guy, I'm open, I'm easy to get to know - I don't lock myself in an ivory tower. So I like people; I enjoy people.

We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.

An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open.

I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.

You can't just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world.

We wish to firmly demonstrate to the world our determination to eliminate all forms of illegal trade in ivory. Poachers and illegal trades in ivory must know that their days are numbered.

There's a good deal of ivory being sold that claims to be antique ivory. In fact, we've seen evidence that there are fake antiques being carved in countries like China.

It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.

Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought.

I am a huge fan of using social media to connect with people because I think there was this 'ivory tower' aspect of journalism where people might read a byline for years but have no idea about the person who was behind it and never get to communicate with them or ask them a question.

I spent a lot of time in Tower Records. I'm a huge music nerd, and Tower was instrumental to me when I was growing up.

The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.

Scholarship aimed at truly understanding what the biblical writers meant often does not filter down into the church and through the pulpit to folks who show up on Sunday. I think that's just wrong, but scholars rarely make any effort to decipher their own scholarly work for people outside the ivory tower.

Great question in science - questions like the ones Herschel raised about the structure of the universe - are seldom answered by ivory-tower types engaging in pure thought. They are answered by people who are willing to get down into the trenches and grapple with nature. If that means casting your own telescope mirrors, as Herschel did, so be it.

I was pretty shocked to learn that as many as 30,000 elephants are being killed every year to fuel the ivory trade, despite an international ban since 1989, and that 60% of forest elephants have already been wiped out. At this rate, experts say populations will become extinct in the next decade. No one needs ivory.

Socrates was a great walker. They say he was a fiend for exercise. He was absolutely not shut away in some ivory tower somewhere.

Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

In my life, I wanted to feel tall. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be tall as the Sears Tower. I wanted to be on top of the Sears Tower. I wanted to be as strong as the Sears Tower feels.

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

Strategy should evolve out of the mud of the marketplace, not in the antiseptic environment of an ivory tower.

I don't see myself in an ivory tower.

I hope I'm not giving the impression of an ivory tower science, but for me science is an attempt to understand, it's an attempt to understand the universe.

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.

The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.

Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.

Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it's exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.

Determining the value of individual texts has been an ideological scuffle in literary criticism for centuries: but the environmental cost of printing them hauls this dispute from the ivory tower into day-to-day decision-making. Is it right to write? The publishing industry is slowly beginning to commit to using sustainably harvested trees.

If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.

Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory - these traders routinely asked about ivory 'horns' and teeth.

The foreign press seems obsessed with the Freedom Tower, as if it was the only thing going on here. In fact, we're trying to keep a huge juggling act in balance, with the tower as just one of the many balls in play.

The artist's life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward.

I wish I could sit back and say, 'Oh, I'm gonna wait for a Merchant-Ivory film to come my way. Or Ivory-Merchant. Whatever it's called. But you just take what's given and then, hopefully, down the road you can be more choosy and only do, say, Wayans brothers movies. That's my goal: to be more Merchant-Ivory-Wayans.

Having a stadium in France named after a footballer from the Ivory Coast, even if I'm proud of my France-Ivory Coast background, is a great proof of integration.

I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.

Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. Oh, the Oxford comma. Here, in case you don't know what it is yet, is the perennial example, as espoused by Harold Ross: "The flag is red, white, and blue." So what do you think of it? Are you for or against it? Do you hover in between?

A 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower in Chicago [and] a 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower directly across the street.

I think the obligation of a poet is not to be in an ivory tower; it is not to be isolated but to be among people.

I'd much rather be in the world than in some ivory tower somewhere.

I don't want to live in an ivory tower, being the songwriter who just turns inward.

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

I've always been interested in pop culture. Some of my colleagues think of pop culture as beneath them, or there's the ivory tower and then there's everybody else, and I never could buy into that wall that's been put up by so many people over the decades and even the centuries.

Back when I was restoring art and antiques, finding ivory was very difficult because it's illegal, and the only difference between bone and ivory is that bone is free and not illegal.

Jan built herself an ivory tower to keep the wolves out; she never dreamed they were already inside.

The majority of the cocoa that we eat, it is actually produced by young kids which are being enslaved in the plantations of the Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast is the largest producer of cocoa.

I'm not a believer in putting designers off in an ivory tower. They need to have a voice at the table so they can identify where and why design can make a difference. We also need to understand the business issues. If we don't make our numbers this quarter, we don't earn the right to do something cool the next time.

It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?

Friedmans influence reaches far beyond the academic community and the world of economics. Rather than lock himself in an ivory tower, he has joined the fray to fight for the survival of this great country of ours.

Seized ivory stocks around Africa are recycled back into illegal trade due to corruption. Ivory stocks should be burnt together with the hopes of traffickers for any "legal" way to allow them to slaughter our elephants.

I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist - a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.

Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.

I think Chris' favorite role was in 'Remains of the Day,' which was the Merchant Ivory film that he shot not long before his accident, a couple years before. He loved working with Merchant Ivory.

I make friends easily. I'm a gregarious guy, I'm open, I'm easy to get to know - I don't lock myself in an ivory tower. So I like people; I enjoy people.

There's an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school's president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department - his field - and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis.