Yale famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.
-- A. Bartlett Giamatti -
I graduated in 1930 and I went up to the Yale Drama School for two years.
-- Albert Maltz -
By the time I came down from Yale, I was already more radicalized and had begun to read New Masses.
-- Albert Maltz -
I auditioned for 'Girls' the fall after I graduated from Yale. The show has been amazing - as close to perfect as it gets!
-- Allison Williams -
It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.
-- Barney Frank -
Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.
-- Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. -
Yale's greatness carries an urgent need to guard against the fall of excellence into exclusivity, of refinement into preciousness, of elegance into class and convention.
-- Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. -
The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.
-- Camille Paglia -
The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale.
-- Cass Sunstein -
I guess I stopped acting when I was 18 and didn't pick it up again until I was 21. That wasn't the plan, though. When I first started at Yale, the plan was to do a movie each summer.
-- Claire Danes -
By the time I went to Yale, I'd been acting for a long time and I was really tired of it. I was restless - and a little bored - and I was really eager to investigate different parts of myself.
-- Claire Danes -
I would love to see writing taught online because at university like Yale, there are not enough teachers who are able to teach writing well, or in some cases, there are none.
-- David Gelernter -
To cite my own alma mater, it's shocking to me that Yale University can teach what it teaches at the Yale School of Environmental Studies and utterly fail to mirror those values in any way in its investment practices.
-- Edward Norton -
One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ‘gravely disabled.’ To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.
-- Elyn Saks -
School is very important; it was very important for me. It gave me an enormous amount of confidence, especially at Yale where we were dealing with all the classics. In dealing with the classics, you are dealing with the very best.
-- Enrico Colantoni -
Other kids are brought up nice and sent to Harvard and Yale. Me? I was brought up like a mushroom.
-- Frank Costello -
A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service: The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible.
-- Frederick W. Smith -
Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.
-- Gaddis Smith -
Obviously, it's a great privilege and pleasure to be here at the Yale Law School Sesquicentennial Convocation. And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.
-- Gerald R. Ford -
Who is more in touch with the problems of this country? One of those guys who goes off to Oxford or to University of Yale, or someone who has lived in buses, in the Metro, in the street?
-- Gloria Trevi -
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.
-- Harry Frankfurt -
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
-- Herman Melville -
I asked my parents for permission to study in America and they were so sure that I wouldn't get in and get a scholarship that they encouraged me to try. So I applied to Yale and got an excellent scholarship. I then worked for the Boston Consulting Group for six and half years.
-- Indra Nooyi -
Although most Americans apparently loathe inflation, Yale economists have argued that a little inflation may be necessary to grease the wheels of the labor market and enable efficiency-enhancing changes in relative pay to occur without requiring nominal wage cuts by workers.
-- Janet Yellen -
John Kerry's victory over Howard Dean has completely changed the presidential race around. Now instead of the rich white guy from Yale who lives in the White house facing off against the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Vermont, he may have to face the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Massachusetts. It's a whole different game.
-- Jay Leno -
Well, I was lucky in that my being an actress totally overshadowed my having some kind of a... legacy at Yale, so that was kind of great.
-- Jordana Brewster -
Nefarious. This is what we get when we hire a Yale boy.†“You missed sacrosanct earlier. And taciturn and glowering,†Jack said. “What’s glowering?†“Me, apparently.†Wilkins pointed. “Now that has to be a joke.†He turned to Davis. “You heard that, right?†Davis didn’t answer him, having spun his chair around to type something at his computer. “Let’s see what Google says… Ah – here it is. ‘Glowering: dark; showing a brooding ill humor.
-- Julie James -
I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love - I meant love in the sense of devotions to one's work - and about half the students got really pissed off.
-- Kiki Smith -
I remember a time at Yale when my work was being critiqued by Paul Rand. Mr. Rand told me only to use Helvetica as a display face never in text, then he squinted, leaned in, and whispered in my ear, "because Helvetica looks like dogshit in text".
-- Kyle Cooper -
I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.
-- Larry Kramer -
My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films!
-- Lloyd Kaufman -
Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.
-- Louis Auchincloss -
Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph. D. from Yale.
-- Mary Blakely -
Yale is practicing a most unusual media strategy. I'd call it Just say nothing.
-- Merrie Spaeth -
I really worked very hard to bring my voice back because I used to have a good voice, and to try to do my exercises that I remember from Yale and all the things in the olden days, clearing your sinuses and all that.
-- Meryl Streep -
I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.
-- Paul Engle -
The only thing I have ever been asked [by a pollster] was the age at which I first indulged in oral sex (which, since it was a Yale Daily News poll, meant kissing).
-- Paul Rudnick -
At Yale we don’t just want to make new things, we want to make things better.
-- Peter Salovey -
George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class - Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we're at it, his father, George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush, was a former president and his grandfather was the Nazis' U.S. banker in the 1930s).
-- Peter York -
Telling the complete story of VeggieTales would require much more time than we have before us tonight. Since this is Yale, I decided to craft a shorter version of the story, using very large words. Remembering though that I was kicked out of Bible College before I'd had a chance to learn many very large words, I concluded that my only remaining option was to tell the story simply, using simple words, and chance the consequences.
-- Phil Vischer -
You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.
-- Richard Foreman -
And the only studies were - Rodney Dangerfield was my mentor and he was my Yale drama school for comedy.
-- Robert Klein -
I played Lucky in Waiting for Godot at Yale and it was a thing that Stanislavski talks about: he says you don't need his 'method' if you can count on your inspiration and it was a moment of inspiration that came to me, not in rehearsal but on stage. It hit me right there in the middle of the play and it was great-it travelled into immediate communication.
-- Sam Waterston -
I'm not impressed by people's degrees. Harvard doesn't impress me, Yale doesn't impress me, Columbia doesn't impress me.
-- Sean Hannity -
With my academic achievement in high school I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that - there are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.
-- Sonia Sotomayor -
I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
-- Sonia Sotomayor -
If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.
-- Tom Wigley -
Privilege, if you're very strict, is an immoral and unjust thing to have, but if you've got it you didn't choose to get it and you might as well use it. You're privileged to be at Yale, but you know you're under an obligation to repay what's been put into you.
-- Walker Evans -
On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' . . . Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.
-- William Safire -
I did improv at Yale, with the Exit Players. It was great, but they played a little rough.
-- Allison Silverman -
When I got out of Yale Drama School, I was completely broke.
-- Courtney B. Vance -
When I was a college student at Yale, I was studying physics and mathematics and was absolutely intent on becoming a theoretical physicist.
-- James Rothman -
The benefits of a modest warming would outweigh the costs - by $8.4 billion a year in 1990 dollars by the year 2060, according to Robert Mendelsohn at Yale University - thanks to longer growing seasons, more wood fiber production, lower construction costs, lower mortality rates, and lower rates of morbidity (illness).
-- Joseph L. Bast -
I suppose in the end what shift occurred - is that at Yale I began to become more materially and conceptually aware of the mechanisms that gave rise to those types of patterns and paintings. And so the copying that happened in the childhood was a much more conscious type of copying in later years.
-- Kehinde Wiley -
Mel [ Bochner] held large-form meetings with students. But the stronger points came through when we had the one-on-one critiques. And that's the system that works at Yale. There's the group critiques, and then there's the one-on-one critiques that happen in studio.
-- Kehinde Wiley -
In the Studio Museum in Harlem, when I was dealing with that community and dealing with my peers in the streets, it allowed for me to get outside of Yale, to get outside of art-speak, and to really think about art as a material practice that has very useful and pragmatic material precedent.
-- Kehinde Wiley -
The work that I wanted to create wasn't being done then. I was too much concerned about fellow students, professors, institutional style [in Yale].
-- Kehinde Wiley -
Larry [Kramer] and I often disagree. There was the whole meshuggaas we went through about his donating his papers to Yale, and I disagreed with him on a number of things about that. You wanted a gay center.
-- Kevin Sessums -
"Weenie" was definitely a word we used at Yale back then. But I'm not sure you were one, Larry [Kramer]. Also, you were going by a different name.
-- Kevin Sessums -
There was a Yale even before Larry [Kramer] and I got there, and there were three designations of students: "white shoe," "brown shoe," and "black shoe." "White shoe" people were kind of the ur-preppies from high-class backgrounds. "Brown shoe" people were kind of the high school student-council presidents who were snatched up and brushed up a little bit to be sent out into the world. "Black shoe" people were beyond the pale. They were chemistry majors and things like that.
-- Kevin Sessums -
We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends.
-- Kevin Sessums -
I have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.
-- Kevin Sessums -
Those people are seen, I assume, by Larry [Kramer] as writing partly about gay issues and problems, whether it's on the surface or not, and I am not. But another thing is when we met, there still wasn't exactly a gay/straight divide in the minds of a lot of straight people. There weren't any gay people, as far as we knew, at Yale.
-- Kevin Sessums -
One of the few nice things about [time in Yale] was you got to know people before there were labels on them, so you got to know them as people, not as either gay or straight. Because as far as we knew, we thought everyone was straight.
-- Kevin Sessums -
[Larry Kramer] got really mad at me once. The precipitating incident was a speech at Yale by the first President Bush's Secretary of Heath and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, against which Larry led a demonstration. He got the demonstrators to drown out Sullivan's speech, which wasn't allowed.
-- Kevin Sessums -
[Larry Kramer] even wrote this angry letter to the president of Yale, and in it he said what he said to us, that he was so disappointed in his straight friends because of AIDS and everything. He wrote the letter around March. And in it he wrote, "I usually go to the Trillins for Christmas, but I just couldn't do it this year."
-- Kevin Sessums -
I think it's a Jewish Yale custom. I wasn't aware that other people celebrated Christmas. My wife was very big on Christmas, and I was very big on my wife.
-- Kevin Sessums -
If someone had come up to me at Yale and asked me how many homosexuals there were in my class, I would have said I don't think there are any. There may have been a few who were shy with girls. You have to understand, this was the 1950s.
-- Kevin Sessums -
I was so unhappy as a child in Washington I figured if I'm going to Yale, I am going to start a new life. I'll change my name to my middle name. So I was known for my four years at Yale as David Kramer.
-- Kevin Sessums -
When I graduated [from Yale], I went back to Larry [Kramer]. But when I go to Yale reunions, there are still people who call me David.
-- Kevin Sessums -
That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.
-- Kevin Sessums -
Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered coporate lawyer - Hillary - in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money - hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P. J. O'Rourke -
To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician)... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.
-- Randy Sandke -
The motto of Harvard isn't 'nice,' it's truth. The motto of Yale isn't 'light and nice,' it's light and truth.
-- Scott Kenemore -
One thing I learned particularly at Yale was how to work with others
-- Trai Byers -
I'm not a plumber who accidentally blew up or a math professor who accidentally backed into notoriety. I have a master's from Yale drama, and I auditioned for this. So obviously I want to be in the limelight in some capacity, or I want to be in entertainment in some capacity.
-- Adam Richman -
At Yale we don’t just want to make new things, we want to make things better.
-- Peter Salovey -
The tyranny of Harvard and Yale is another thing that transcends this problem of the set point. But what's so striking about [Louis] Brandeis is he had this vision of cultural pluralism that completely gave the lie to the idea that there was any inconsistency between being Jewish or being a woman or being African American and being fully American.
-- Jeffrey Rosen -
I had a very pleasant three years at Yale. I must say I did take it seriously, and consequently it took me a while to get over it.
-- Will Davis Campbell