Academic Work Quotes

• And if you look at all this academic work in the conferences and so on there's a constant theme that terrorism is extremely hard to define and we therefore have to have a deep thinking about it. And the reason it's hard to define is quite simple. It's hard to find a definition that includes what they do to us but excludes what we do to them. That's quite difficult. So it takes a global war on terrorism.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Simple, Thinking

  "Anti-Intellectualism, Terrorism, and Elections in Contemporary Education: a Discussion with Noam Chomsky". Interview with Dan Falcone, www.counterpunch.org. June 3, 2016.

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• I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

  Ken Thompson

  Jobs, Reading, Gardening

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• Writing on the blog, you want to get attention and make strong claims. In academic work, that often doesn't pay, so sometimes it's a little bit difficult going back and forth to navigate these differences.

  Alex Tabarrok

  Strong, Writing, Differences

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• Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.

  Simone Weil

  Education, Order, Pearls

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.36, Routledge

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• I've often heard academics disparage non-academic writing in terms that suggest it could be a negative in the tenure process, irrespective of the quality of academic work under review.

  Daniel Drezner

  Writing, Quality, Negative

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• I tried being a mechanic and I tried catering, but I realized I had even less aptitude for semi-skilled labour than for academic work.

  Toby Young

  Aptitude, Mechanic, Catering

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• [At high school in Cape Town] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects.

  Allan McLeod Cormack

  School, Knowledge, Learning

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• The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.

  John Piper

  Christian, Writing, Biblical

  John Piper (2013). “Think”, p.20, SPCK

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• A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.

  Michael Crichton

  Religious, Origin Of Life, Other Worlds

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• My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

  David Eagleman

  Writing, Lenses, Labs

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• I hope telling stories though 'Making a Difference' - as in my academic work and nonprofit work - will help me to live my grandmother's adage of 'Life is not about what happens to you, but about what you do with what happens to you.'

  Chelsea Clinton

  Grandmother, Differences, Making A Difference

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