To be an outspoken professor in academia is a very dangerous proposition.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.

My father is a college professor and that’s about the extent of my college experience. I’m sort of a professional student forever. I think just as human beings we always have a student who is alive in us and is waiting to pop up and make us feel like we are 16 years-old again.

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy … would never—so he assures us—have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by… worried… about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.