College Quotes

This part for “General Hospital” came up, and I only took it because I needed the money. I didn’t think it was any kind of career move… I thought, “Nobody watches these shows except blue-haired old ladies ironing.” But it just happened to become the popular TV show among college kids that summer. It was […]

I think I had spent up my available capital for extroversion in college, and I had to be by myself. I intended to take one year, but ended up taking four.

My father, who was technically an immigrant—he came when he was an infant—wanted me to be an American, preferably an American president. He didn’t go to college. Before I was born he wanted me to go specifically to Yale, which he thought would help. It was easy for him to think I could be president: […]

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.

My roommate in college in Austin, Texas, was Wes Anderson. Wes always wanted to be a director. I was an English major in college, and he got us to work on a screenplay together. And then, in working on the screenplay, he wanted my brother, Luke, and me to act in this thing. We did […]

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.