Lecture Quotes

1. "And of course, we know that opportunity lies outside the reach of some of our people. We don't need flowery words about inequality to tell us that, and we don't need a party that has led while poverty and hunger rose to record levels to give us lectures about suffering."
Author: Artur Davis

2. "He moved to run a hand through her cornrows, then pulled back remembering the one time he's tried that-Connie had lectured him on the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not touch thy black girlfriend's hair. Ever."
Author: Barry Lyga

3. "New Rule: You can't bum-rush the president for autographs after he just lectured you for an hour about how you have to grow up. Have some dignity, for Christ's sake. He's your coworker, not Hannah Montana. If you're this crazy about him now, what are you going to do if he turns the country around, ask him to sign your tit?"
Author: Bill Maher

4. "Where once September seemed merely and quietly odd, staring out the window during Mathematics lectures and reading big colorful books under her desk during Civics, now the other children sensed something wild and foreign about her."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

5. "So you didn't tell me it was a messed-up idea to keep this all a secret because. . ." Because experience is the only teacher," Hey-Soos says. "Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don't listen to their parents, or people don't leave churches and do what the preacher tells them? There's only one thing that's universal." What's that?" The truth."
Author: Chris Crutcher

6. "Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish."
Author: Christopher Isherwood

7. "To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]"
Author: David McCullough

8. "But Dr. Smith says, and I believe it to be a true state of the case, that he himself gave a course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy, during the same winter, and that the money raised by them was also applied towards paying for the Orrery."
Author: David Rittenhouse

9. "Dad hit lecture mode from word one."
Author: Devon Monk

10. "Martin Luther called the church building the "Mundhaus" (lit. "mouth house" or "speech house") because he believed that the Graeco-Roman "pagan lecture" of the sophist entertainers who took over the Catholic church should be the focus of "the service". Sermons might have been helpful in the later Middle Ages when even many Catholic priests couldn't read. However, modern research has repeatedly proven that lecturing is the worst possible way to educate others because it's so boring. Might traditional, so-called-inspired preaching still be the best way to communicate God's Word?" ~ © gfp '42™"
Author: Gary Patton

11. "Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted."
Author: Gary Taubes

12. "The interval allowed was only five minutes, at the end of which I resumed the lecture; but so refreshing was the effects of the brief rest and, above all, the admission of pure air, that during the second hour the attention was as completely sustained as during the first."
Author: George Combe

13. "Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere."
Author: Gian Carlo Rota

14. "The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

15. "I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up ablithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, givingobscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks."
Author: Henry Rollins

16. "After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, 'God, Madam'."
Author: Ian T. Ker

17. "Hahahaha, so watching him giving a lecture is an aphrodisiac?"
Author: Ika Natassa

18. "That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there-an outside lecturer."
Author: Ishmael Reed

19. "From 1931 to 1937, I was a Fellow and Lecturer in Economics at Hertford College, Oxford."
Author: James Meade

20. "I have seen many phases of life; I have moved in imperial circles, I have been a Minister of State; but if I had to live my life again, I would always remain in my laboratory, for the greatest joy of my life has been to accomplish original scientific work, and, next to that, to lecture to a set of intelligent students."
Author: Jean Baptiste Dumas

21. "It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing."
Author: John O'Donohue

22. "Anyway.I'm not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven't actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn't good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, "But it's turtles all the way down!"I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

23. "As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns."
Author: Joseph Stiglitz

24. "Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'."
Author: Julian Barnes

25. "A sex lecture from two senior citizens... it was worth it to get that kiss from you."
Author: Kathleen Brooks

26. "As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

27. "But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews."
Author: Laurence Housman

28. "You can only fight one man at a time with a sword, but, with a pen, you can compose a lecture to bore legions of enemy troops to death."
Author: Lindsay Buroker

29. "I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls."
Author: Lionel Blue

30. "DestinyThe chicken I bought last night,Frozen,Returned to life,Laid the biggest egg in the world,And was awarded the Nobel Prize.The phenomenal eggWas passed from hand to hand,In a few weeks had gone all round the earth,And round the sunIn 365 days.The hen received who knows how much hard currency,Assessed in buckets of grainWhich she couldn't manage to eatBecause she was invited everywhere,Gave lectures, granted interviews,Was photographed.Very often reporters insistedThat I too should poseBeside her.And so, having served artThroughout my life,All of a sudden I've attained to fameAs a poultry breeder."
Author: Marin Sorescu

31. "Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him - why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also."
Author: Mark Twain

32. "It's obviously unfair to paint with a broad brush here, but the germ of an idea for a breakthrough in technology doesn't come out of a business school curriculum. It comes out of a laboratory or a math lecture or a physics tutorial."
Author: Michael Moritz

33. "5. If You Love, Love Openly Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master. Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting. Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said: "If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."
Author: Nyogen Senzaki

34. "Surely, the gods' judgment is certain. But as for us, we must be satisfied to 'come close' to those things, for we are men, who speak according to what is likely, and whose lectures resemble fables."
Author: Proclus

35. "I was coming down off the last painkiller left in my dresser drawer after Autumn tossed my stash. In that moment I was so groggy and happy I would have accepted a date with Oscar the Grouch - and planned to do some serious feeling up on the green furry beast too. Yeah, stooping to pharmaceutical-inspired sex fantasies about garbage can Sesame Street characters - that had to be the best Just Say No drug lecture a girl in a leg cast could ever receive to make her go cold turkey off the meds."
Author: Rachel Cohn

36. "The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as ‘the sum of the functions by which death is resisted"
Author: Richard Holmes

37. "Rose," she said, leaning toward me. "I'm going to be blunt with you. I'm not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren't my student anymore, I don't have the right to ask or tell you anything." It was like what Adrian had said. "You can lecture," I told her. "I've always respected you and want to hear what you have to say." The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. "All right, here it is. You screwed up." "Wow. You weren't kidding about bluntness."
Author: Richelle Mead

38. "You should make her call you ‘Miss Georgina,'" added Hugh with a mocking southern drawl. "Or at least ‘ma'am.'"Niphon's presence and Jerome's lecture had put me in a grouchy mood. "I'm not doing any mentoring. She's so gungho to take on the world's male population, she doesn't even need me."The three men exchanged more smirks. Cody made some hissing and meowing sounds, scratching at the air."This isn't funny," I said."Sure it is," said Cody."
Author: Richelle Mead

39. "Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn't need them for her destiny... It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and live on his money till she is eighty, going to lectures and comparing the attractions of winter tours that offer the romance of the Caribbean."
Author: Robertson Davies

40. "Washington dwelt upon the transcendent importance of education underscores the stigma that he felt about having missed college. As president, he lectured a young relative about to enter college that "every hour misspent is lost forever" and that "future years cannot compensate for lost days at this period of your life."15"
Author: Ron Chernow

41. "Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other's rooms and drink coffee - I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now - you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk?"
Author: Stephen Fry

42. "A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation."
Author: Stephen Fry

43. "I love my lecture tours. I get up onstage. I have my stack of books and a glass of water and a microphone. No podium, no distance between me and the audience, and I just talk to people and get all excited and tell a lot of jokes, and sing some songs, and read from my work and remind people how powerful they are and how beautiful they are."
Author: Suzan Lori Parks

44. "Then there are the people who know me from the lectures. What I am really trying to do, what I need to accomplish at this time, is to fill in the gaps."
Author: Suzanne Somers

45. "I have lectured at the U.N. and travelled widely, giving lectures on human rights and gender inequalities in universities. But this is a life I do not wish to live. I don't want to be a showcase, I want to be in a battlefield where I can stand beside the oppressed and the poor."
Author: Taslima Nasrin

46. "Distant singing is heard. Ghostly voices become audible: fragments of lectures remembered, the finely distilled wisdom and passion of seers and poets with which the modern young mind is tempered for the world that blows it to pieces."
Author: Tennessee Williams

47. "We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might."
Author: Theodore C. Sorensen

48. "They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of Magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out."
Author: Tom Wolfe

49. "At least believe this many humans, who are interested obviously in this topic. Many of them visited me after lectures and meetings, in hope that I can give concrete answers to their questions. For it was clear: If that does not know it, who is to then know it?"
Author: Ulrich Walter

50. "Your generation is so cynical. You should try to help every individual person you meet, Ari, as a reflex, without thinking." Ari put his head on the steering wheel. "Here we find a fundamental weakness of the Christ doctrine," the Minister declared, making that wise and relatable face that had always been such a success in his television lectures. "It troubles itself too much with conscience, rationale, and so on. Now, I myself am a student of human nature. I observe all faiths, and draw my own conclusions. For example, a Christian sees a tramp in the street, he begins agonizing. Should I give him the money in my pocket? What if he uses it for drink? What if he wastes it? What if there's someone else who needs it more? What if I need it more? And so on. The Jews, the Muslims—they see a tramp, they give him money, they walk on. The action is its own justification."
Author: Zadie Smith

Lecture Quotes Pictures