Oxford Quotes

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

Relatively, there are many scientists who believe in God. And in Oxford, where I am the Professor, there are more professors like me, who believe in God, than you think. There are not dozens of them, but they are there, and in Cambridge too, and elsewhere. We are not in a tiny minority.

My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater.

Always have a pink Oxford shint ready for days when you're feeling run down.

Wherever you turn your eye—except in science—an Oxford man is at the top of the tree.

[To Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, on his return from self-imposed exile, occasioned by the embarrassing flatulence he had experienced in the presence of the Queen:] My Lord, I had forgot the fart.

Oxford shirts. Definitely more oxford shirts.

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble

To call a man a characteristically Oxford man is, in my opinion, to give him the highest compliment that could be paid to any human being.

My dad, in particular, was adamant that I should finish my education. He encouraged me to go to Oxford, for instance, and I rather doubt I'd have gone if he hadn't. I would have gone straight back to L.A. and tried to start my career.

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.

Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."

You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.

Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.

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?

Since my education, I've done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians - certainly when I was there - went to Cambridge. I don't know whether it's the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford, because it seemed more of an easy bridge.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.

What I learned at Oxford has been used to great advantage throughout my business career.

We've been sold a concept of joy through advertising. It was somehow sold to us through a Gucci bag or something.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

If you Google me, you'll find plenty of "dumb blonde" references - even though I graduated with honors from Stanford and studied at Oxford University. I don't let it bother me.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

We have the ability to approach our race like ants, or we have the ability to approach our race like crabs.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember

People say I've got a bad reputation. I think I've got the best reputation in the building.

I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn't know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn't do that in Pakistan - you'd be thrown in prison.

I went to Oxford University - but I've never let that hold me back.

In Oxford before the war, I had, with this interest in mind, written a short textbook entitled, An Introduction to Economic Analysis and Policy. It was now my intention to rewrite this work.

Okay, everyone please be completely quiet, because I can literally hear a whisper, and it’ll throw off my stream of consciousness, and when I get my stream of consciousness going that’s when I give the best, illest quotes. Literally, a whisper can throw it off.

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

Time is the only thing you can't buy.

Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men.

There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that's all.

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John.

In fact the experience at Oxford has really helped me later in life.

When I'm not governing my country any more, I'll go back to taking care of children. Or else I'll start studying anthropology - it's a science that's always interested me very much, also in relation to the problem of poverty. Or else I'll go back to studying history - at Oxford I took my degree in history. Or else...I don't know, I'm fascinated by the tribal communities. I might busy myself with them.

A lot of girls annoy me who go to university - one girl told me she was going to Oxford because it was something to do between leaving school and getting married. And I've got to pay for that being an income tax payer.

This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.

In 1960, I went to St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and received the B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1964.

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.