In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American colle...
MIT Student: Can we open up the window, Professor? It's hot in here. John Nash: Your comfort comes second to my ability to hear my own voice.
When you're teaching a hard concept and the students all have puzzled looks on their faces and then suddenly you can see that 'aha' moment, that they got it, that's just an incredible thing.
The idea of celibate vampires is ridiculous. To me, vampires are sex. I don't get a vampire story about abstinence. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.
I consider myself a perpetual student. You seek and learn every day: from an experiment in the lab, from reading a scientific journal, from taking care of a patient. Because of this, I rarely get bored.
...the student of prehistoric man...cannot reject [the Castenedolo skull] as false without doing injury to his sense of truth, and he cannot accept it as fact without shattering his accepted beliefs.
Life is like an extremely toughest examination and so the passing percentage of its students is abysmally low; a person with his 70 % contributions of the true kind deeds has only cleared it with a distinction and that is worth to be deemed as his li...
People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?
It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.
The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, fam...
I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.
Just hear me out. While you were napping, I was busy chatting up our allies. Didn't you know--your woman's a golden-tongued ambassador! My sisters always said I graduated from the shock-and-awe school of diplomacy, but joke 'em if they can't take a f...
This funny thing happens when you graduate college. You hear so much about being an adult that you start to feel like you have to become a different person overnight, that growing up means being not you. And you concentrate so hard on living up to th...
There's a simplicity and a sense of adventure to being alone, and I sometimes envy you for having it, as you explore Paris. Even when you're getting your heart broken, you can still wake up and not know what's going to happen next.
The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it's the look of exhausted loyalties. Perhaps it's...
No ancient Jew was ever promised, or expected, a heavenly life. That was a wild and outrageous teaching of Jesus. Holy text never offers a heavenly hope--before Jesus. Think about it: No matter how faithful Adam would have been, he could never gradua...
So, if he wants to treat me like I’m ten instead of twenty, that’s okay. If he wants to have one of his company cars take me and pick me up from school, that’s okay. And if he insists that I live with him until I graduate college, that’s okay...
I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to do – I couldn’t keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn’t work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write wel...
Thank you so much for the rude know-it-all attitude while also having to look at your ridiculously colored hair and obnoxious facial and chest piercings. I am very fortunate to have just been schooled by someone who looks like they graduated from Car...
I should have paid greater attention to my mentor in graduate school, Samuel Huntington, who once explained that Americans never recognize that, in the developing world, the key is not the kind of government — communist, capitalist, democratic, dic...
Well we're waiting here in Allentown, For the Pennsylvania we never found, For the promises our teachers gave, If we worked hard, If we behaved... So the graduations hang on the wall, But they never really helped us at all, No they never taught us wh...
