Quotes & Sayings About Ivory Towers

I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence. — Michael Eric Dyson

Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues. — Colin Powell

If the only people we seek to impress are within our own ivory towers of artistic excellence or our hallowed institutions, we will find the audience is gone in 20 to 30 years. I find as I keep a broader audience in mind, I choose to sing and say more things I actually want to share and fewer things just for the sake of impressing others. — Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick

Liberty can't be saved by those who retire into their ivory towers or take to the hills, so to speak, to bemoan its plight.2 It is the individual who is active who pushes liberty over the brink - or rescues her - depending on the nature of his actions. Inactive people are as uninfluential on this question as is any inert mass. — Leonard E. Read

Scientists are supposed to live in ivory towers. Their darkrooms and their vibration-proof benches are supposed to isolate their activities from the disturbances of common life. What they tell us is supposed to be for the ages, not for the next election. But the reality may be otherwise. — Simon LeVay

Chefs who cook in these ivory towers are in control in their own world. We try to approximate that world as best we can, but ultimately our goal is to please our clients. — David Castle

Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story. — Graham Hancock

Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness. — Jonathan Heatt

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures. — Terry Eagleton

Programs, systems and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text. But the invitation to know God - truly know Him - is always an invitation to suffer. Not to suffer alone, but to suffer with Him. — Joni Eareckson Tada

Even ivory towers need central heating. — Breyten Breytenbach

I hope I'm not giving the impression of an ivory tower science, but for me science is an attempt to understand, it's an attempt to understand the universe. — George Coyne

The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob. — Gerard De Nerval

The creators of the Constitution were not purple-robed scholars, sitting in their ivory towers attempting to put abstract theories into play, but men who had come to realize that their system of government was broken. These men desired desperately to repair it. — C.L. Gammon

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou. — Ben Shapiro

I see top business schools working to bridge this gap [between academic research and business application] by respecting executive education, by having more mature students who proactively draw from faculty what they know they need, and by having faculty who are willing to leave their ivory towers for the murky world of business reality. Unfortunately, at other times, business professors have little or not interest or savvy about business issues. — Dave Ulrich

It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done. — Jodi Picoult

That's a big part of being a designer now: going out, having dinners, meeting people. Being in an ivory tower, you can feel very removed. — Joseph Altuzarra

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter. — Logan Pearsall Smith

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert. — Bruce Crown

We look down on our scientists if they engage in outside consultation. We implicitly promote the ivory tower. — Vikram Sarabhai

As for mathematicians themselves: don't expect too much help. Most of them are too far removed in their ivory towers to take up such challenges. And anyway, they are not competent. After all, they are just mathematicians-what we need is paramathematicians, like you ... It is you who can be the welding force, between mathematicians and stories, in order to achieve the synthesis. — Apostolos Doxiadis

For me or a Bruce Springsteen to sit up in our ivory towers and make comments about racism, well, were not really in it, are we? — John Mellencamp