Quotes & Sayings About Ivy League

I think that a lot of the drive to have overachieving children is defensive - the idea of making sure your child is fully armed against all the other kids, whose parents are busy packing their little brains with facts so they can claw their way into the Ivy League over the broken bodies of their classmates. While — John Scalzi

That's what the Ivy League is. And many of the people there are legacy. Their families went there; their families are in government. The kids go there. — Rush Limbaugh

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people. — Robert Reich

No doubt, the White House thinks the American people know Obama's story. But since the Inauguration, we've seen only the president's present: his perfect family, his Ivy League elegance, his effortless mastery of complex issues. We never see him sweat. And we forget that he ever had to struggle. — Dee Dee Myers

As Feministing commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article "Students of Virginity," on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, "There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete's sake. — Jessica Valenti

There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid. — Camille Paglia

Could it be that Cania isn't the ultimate prep school, isn't the sure way into the Ivy League? As if to solidify my suspicion, a guy with emo eyeliner tells his ill-fated story. — Anonymous

What an indictment that is, of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word, than do those institutions. — William Deresiewicz

At this point I feel I would be remiss to not mention the prevalence of a specific kind of person who enters the field of book publishing. This is the English lit major who never should have left academia, a genius who has read all of V.S. Naipaul but can't photocopy title pages right side up. This person is very thin, possibly vegan, probably Ivy League. He or she feels as if answering the phone in a chipper voice is a form of legalized prostitution. He or she has a single quirky fashion piece, usually red or black, and waxes poetic about typewriters and the British, having never truly known either. Regardless of sex, they all want to be David Foster Wallace when they grow up. — Sloane Crosley

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise. — George Gilder

It's just become such a business, getting into college. I see that a lot in my friends, their parents were so on top of them about getting into an Ivy League school since they were so young, they were just drilled and drilled and drilled, to the point that they just don't know why they want to go. — Nat Wolff

I don't want to send my money to a bunch of Hugo Chavez-loving, Ivy League ideologically educated, politically opportunistic careerist in Washington, D.C. — Sean Hannity

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati
those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues. — Edward Abbey

People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction. — E.L. Doctorow

For some students, school is the only place where they get a hot meal and a warm hug. Teachers are sometimes the only ones who tell our children they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League, from the home of a struggling single mom to the White House. — Denise Juneau

Here, dear reader, you must summon patient compassion. Try to imagine the hardships of a military officer triply burdened by close relationships with political leaders and the national news media, an Ivy League PhD, and wartime triumphs leading an elite airborne division. Our hero somehow survived in spite of it all. He rose against his handicaps, triumphing over the awful mark of Princeton University, that great gathering place for outcasts, rebels, and the socially obscure. He secured higher military rank even though he had been successful in combat. He adroitly worked CBS News, the Washington Post, and the United States Senate, yet still rose to prominence. — Chris Bray

I didn't go to Ivy League schools. I dropped out of college to go into movies. — Rob Lowe

I'm a graduate of Princeton, and I just want to say you don't have to go to an Ivy League school to be on the Supreme Court. — Richard Land

We discussed this dire problem with education and illusions of academic contribution, with Ivy League universities becoming in the eyes of the new Asian and U.S. upper class a status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, professors, and other agents. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs a decent university "name" to get ahead in life; but we know that collectively society doesn't appear to advance with organized education. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best
it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money
provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it. — Peter De Vries

The test scores used in admissions are a measure of what colleges take in, not what they produce. The fact that an Ivy League school has freshmen with high SAT scores tells us that it is a good magnet for talent but nothing else. What should matter is how students, including those with low SAT scores, improve over the course of their time in school. — Fareed Zakaria

Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background. — Paul Giamatti

Despite Langdon's six-foot frame and athletic build, Anderson saw none of the cold, hardened edge he expected from a man famous for surviving an explosion at the Vatican and a manhunt in Paris. This guy eluded the French police ... in loafers? He looked more like someone Anderson would expect to find hearthside in some Ivy League library reading Dostoyevsky. — Dan Brown

On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president. — Dee Dee Myers

Judith Stacey - a prominent New York University professor who is in no way regarded as a fringe figure, in testifying before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act - expressed hope that the revisionist view's triumph would give marriage "varied, creative, and adaptive contours . . . [leading some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek . . . small group marriages."44 In their statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," more than three hundred "LGBT and allied" scholars and advocates - including prominent Ivy League professors - call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.45 University of Calgary Professor Elizabeth Brake thinks that justice requires us to use legal recognition to "denormalize[] heterosexual monogamy as a way of life" and correct for "past discrimination against homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, and care networks."46 — Sherif Girgis

My husband worked on Wall Street and was an Ivy League graduate as well. In our world, we were the last couple you'd imagine enmeshed in domestic violence. — Leslie Morgan Steiner

Judith Rodin president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the first woman to serve a president of an Ivy League university remarked My generation fought so hard to give all of you choices. We believe in choices. But choosing to leave the workforce was not the choice we thought so many of you would make — Sheryl Sandberg

You cannot write an accurate history of The Holocaust without accounting for the Harvard students and professors that help make the science an acceptable world-wide movement. — A.E. Samaan

Excellent Sheep is likely to makea lasting mark for three reasons. One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent twenty-four years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale.He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He's a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net. Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America.Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness. — Dwight Garner

There is no cost difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education; the main difference is curriculum. — Paul Hawken

Taylor sighed. Going head-to-head with Sharpay on a school assignment was really beneath her. But the more Taylor considered it, the more she liked the idea of seeing her own poem in the paper. After all, the words "published poet" would look awfully good on those Ivy League college applications.

"You know what?" Taylor said.

"What?" Sharpay snapped.

Hands on hips, Taylor stepped forward till the girls were nose-to-nose. "Bring it on. — Alice Alfonsi

This time, the pathologist had a morgue assistant, a tall, skinny guy with glasses like airplane windows and a nimbus of brown hair, triple the height of Lyle Lovett's, and with a wave that rivaled the Banzai Pipeline. The hair probably had its own intelligence. It probably had its own Netflix account. It probably received regular invitations to speak at Ivy League commencement ceremonies. It probably contained a netherworld where monsters had houses. — Nina Post

I don't think that writing talent has much to do with where one went to school, or the number of degrees on one's business card, but I do get a bit bristly at the implication that romance authors couldn't possibly be smart enough to get into an Ivy League school. — Julia Quinn

On the other hand, looking careless could just be privileged give-a-shit Ivy League attitude, like wearing duct tape on loafers and jeans with holes in them, knowing all along that they were headed straight to Wall Street or Washington and three-piece suits. — Karl Marlantes

It was a presidential election year, and as a member of a consortium of Ivy League radio stations, we participated in 'network' coverage of election night. — Andrea Mitchell

I don't come from an Ivy League school or anywhere else. — Kevin McCarthy

When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader. — Walter E. Williams

Maybe we were being a bit unrealistic, but we had this hope that if we could just get into the Ivy League, everything would be set. We dreamed of Gothic libraries and leafy green quads and romantic dorms with fireplaces and guys who were not only cute but also smart and charming, and, quite possibly, British. In college, we believed, we'd finally find our people. — Sarah Strohmeyer

There's more philosophy in jiu-jitsu mats than in any Ivy League school in America. — Renzo Gracie

We were totally opposite - me coming from the West Coast and a junior college, and him [ Christopher Reeve] from the hard-core Ivy League. He used to be the studly studly of all studlies, and I was the little fool ferret boy. — Robin Williams

When I was 14 or 15, I was a really good volleyball player, so I thought, 'Well, maybe I'll just get a scholarship to an Ivy League school through volleyball.' Then I quit when I decided to focus on theater. — Elizabeth Olsen

I lived in Boston until last year," he said, in a falsely low-key way, because "Boston" was code for Harvard (otherwise he would say MIT or Tufts or anywhere else), just as another woman said, "I was in New Haven," in that coy manner that pretended not to be coy, which meant that she had been at Yale. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The American Dream is still alive out there, and hard work will get you there. You don't necessarily need to have an Ivy League education or to have millions of dollars startup money. It can be done with an idea, hard work and determination. — Bill Rancic

I was very close to playing at an Ivy League School. The Division I schools, when a coach would come visit all he would talk about was my size. — Doug Flutie

This year, Keystone charges $21,750 in tuition and fees. In comparison, UPenn docked $9,600 for the same in 1984, so for the current cost of a Keystone education, once could attend an Ivy League school for two years, with enough bouncing coins left over for many cases of beer and bong hits. UPenn's tuition and fees are now $47,668. Of course, wages haven't increased fivefold in thirty years. The obscene overpricing of a diluted education is yet another sign that we're failing future generations. To stuff the pockets of a few smirking old farts and their precious scions, countless young people are maimed. — Linh Dinh

And now to that Victim whose Sign rose above the world two thousand years ago, to be menaced now by that other sign now rising, I say a prayer of contrition. I, whom you have seen as irreverent and irreligious, now pray in the name of Chuckler and Hoosier and Runner, in the name of Smoothface, Gentlemen, Amish, and Oakstump, Ivy-League and Big-Picture, in the name of all those who suffered in the jungles and on the beaches, from Anzio to Normandy--and in the name of the immolated: of Texan, Rutherford, Chicken, Loudmouth, of the Artist and White-Man, Souvenirs and Racehorse, Dreadnought and Commando--of all these and the others, dear Father, forgive us for that awful cloud. — Robert Leckie

We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses. — Grace Lee Boggs

Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League. — Jeff Hobbs

My high school was a private school where you went to an Ivy League. That's just what was expected of you and nothing less. So I grew up never being okay with a 'B' because a 'B' was not good enough. — Troian Bellisario

I couldn't hear anything or anyone, there was only the sound of our sex and the smell of books. — Juliet Gauvin

he still looked like a preppy douchebag who wore sweaters tied around his neck like some Ivy League pedophile to me. — Tijan

Everyone today is like, 'Shailene, you're getting so much buzz. How does the feel?' It's the most odd question because it's like asking a kid who got into Cornell how it feels to be the top of your class at one of the Ivy League schools. How do you answer that? You just go, 'I don't know.' — Shailene Woodley

ROTC programs at Ivy League campuses would liberalize the military. That can only be good for this country. — Evan Wright

At the prosecution table, Flagler gave me his Ivy League snicker. If I wanted, I could dangle him out the window by his ankles. But then, I was picking up penalties for late hits while he was singing tenor with the Whiffenpoofs. Okay, so I'm not Yale Law Review, but I'm proud of my diploma. University of Miami. Night division. Top half of the bottom third of my class. — Paul Levine

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets. — Russell Baker

Bill Clinton also benefited from a friendly press corps. With their baby boomer background, more liberal views, and Ivy League lawyer credentials, the Clintons fit the mold of many of the baby boomer reporters. In time, of course, the press would turn on Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, however, it seemed to me that some news outlets allowed their zeal for change to undermine their high standards of journalistic objectivity. (The pattern would later repeat with another exciting candidate promising change, Barack Obama.) — George W. Bush

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the elites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. — Ken Auletta

The Jews celebrate Passover by eating unpalatable food to remind them what will happen to their people if they ever leave New York City. The traditional meal often includes gefilte fish. For those of you who don't know what gefilte fish is, it strongly resembles a ball of tuna fish that has been passed nasally. It's not good. During Passover, the angel of death passed over the Jews - an event that, up until the late 1950s, was re-enacted every year by Ivy League colleges and suburban country clubs. — Jon Stewart

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up
by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody -
a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns -
bent down and helped us pick up our boots. — Thurgood Marshall

From the beginning, I've told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I'm the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel. — Pat Conroy

Mostly, as I'm sitting here in A.P. English, I think about the way my classmates are always raising their hands and sucking up to Mrs. Giavotella just so she will give them As, which they will send to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford or where-fucking-ever, to go along with their lies about how much community service they supposedly did and essays about how much they care about poor minority children they'll never meet in real life or how they are going to save the world armed with nothing but a big heart and an Ivy League education. — Matthew Quick

By the time these students enter the workforce, many of the jobs they will apply for ill be in industries that don't even exist yet. That's a hard future to prepare someone for. Teachers have their sights set on the real goal: not to produce Ivy League graduates, but to encourage the development of naturally curious, confident, flexible, and happy learners who are ready for whatever the future has in store. — Taylor Mali

When I started in the press there were really ink-stained wretches. Not everybody went to college. Now, everybody at the New York Times and the Washington Post and Salon and Slate, most of them have Ivy League educations. — Joe Klein

But to do it professionally is a quantum leap difference and my father had to be persuaded by these kind of Ivy League professors that I should go to the Yale Drama School, another one of the stories in there. — Robert Klein

There's a bias on hiring the best engineers wherever they come from. It does seem like a lot of the non-engineering execs come from Ivy League schools, as is true in much of corporate America and government. — Ken Auletta

Hillary Clinton lived at Wellesley and Yale. Her circle of friends was that Ivy League bunch, and they were all being trained for lives in government. They were all being trained for lives of government: CIA, State Department. — Rush Limbaugh

By climbing a steeper road, the value and appreciation Delaware State students took and continue to take from their education and their experiences is just as great, if not greater, than students attending ivy league schools. — Michael N. Castle

I never graduated high school; they had to change the Ivy League rules. During my tenure at Brown, I helped them become the number one Ivy League school. — Robert Evans

Someone told me at the beginning of that summer that I would come face-to-face with death because of a Romeo and Juliet romance, I would never have believed it. But it wasn't like that summer went at all like I had planned in the first place. The Columbia recruiter sat across from me, her dark bushy eyebrows rising as high as they could go while she stared down at my application. "So, Alex, I see that you don't have any extracurricular activities." I shrugged. I was sitting in one of those uncomfortable orange plastic chairs in the guidance counselor's office, wishing I could just disappear. I was the first student in all of Winnebago High School's history to have a recruiter from an Ivy League school visit. By the way she looked at our tiny school with its ancient, chipped walls and rusted lockers, I could see why nobody had wanted to visit in the past. — Magan Vernon

These ivy league students are in the upper echelon of the college boards and had great opportunity in front of them regardless of where they go to college. Its in their very nature and it is something they expect. — Michael N. Castle

I came out of my professional athlete career with a 450 credit score, no money in the bank to show for it, but I had an Ivy League degree. So I put that Dartmouth degree to good use and got a job on Wall Street. I hated it but used the time to make connections and become financially literate. — Brian J. White

In the steel-and-glass society that we live in, the value system would be that the lawyer, with the Mercedes and the fine suit and the Ivy League education, was more valued than the minority without the education. But on the island, the rules are changed. It's the person who can make a fire or who can make friends. A kind human soul is valued. — Scott Raab

If parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable. — Michael Sandel

I am an Ivy league graduate. I have a Harvard MBA. I've opened casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and the French Riviera. I've worked for the Santangelo's, the Lucchetti's and the Gambino's. — Jackie Chanel

I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really. — Spalding Gray

I never went to camp as a kid. I couldn't get into an Ivy League school. I wouldn't join a biker club. — Bob Saget

It's not like we're at a community college and God is at an Ivy League school. It's like we're at a community college and God comprehends all the mysteries and mechanics of the entire universe. We don't even operate in the same stratosphere as God. — Stephen Altrogge

Few aspects of my work in the DA's Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was. — Sonia Sotomayor

Just when I think you've hit bottom you continue to amaze me," Kyle said. "Or, does this get worse? Nothing would surprise me after this. Are you sleeping with a married man whose wife is dying of cancer?"
Elroy didn't think he'd done anything wrong. "I know nothing about his wife, or his husband for that matter. I don't ask and I'm not out to break up his home. Lighten up, man. Everybody does it. It's not like I'm going to freaking marry this dude. I'm only having a little fun with him. You wanna come with me? We'll have a three-way. You should see the way this guy moves. It will blow your mind."
With that remark Kyle shoved his hands into his pockets and walked faster. "No, thank you. That's not something I'm interested in doing. Meeting nice, decent people is the only thing that blows my mind. I just hope you're using condoms, you goddman asshole. — Ryan Field

Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I'm some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. Whatever — J.D. Vance

Whatever success I have achieved, whatever positions of leadership I have held have depended less on Ivy League degrees or SAT scores or GPAs, and have instead been due to that sense of connection and empathy - the special obligation I felt, as a black man like you, to help those who need it most, people who didn't have the opportunities that I had - because there but for the grace of God, go I - I might have been in their shoes. I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family. And that motivates me. — Barack Obama

Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them? — Alfie Kohn

A number of bloggers in economics and the financial sector have risen to prominence through the sheer strength of their work. Note it was not their family connections nor ties to Ivy League schools or elite banks, but rather the strength of their research, analysis and writing. — Barry Ritholtz

Desmond Coolwater is a well dressed, young prestigious ivy league gentleman and dabbling misogynist with a key to the metropolitan Denver nightlife as well as a job with a local, yet well known magazine as an entertainment / advertising executive.

He knows how to make money marketing and beguiling women, but he is about take losses on a level that he's not accustomed to and in order to overcome losing his job, nearly losing his father and the possibility for love with the right woman he will have to reinvent cool. — Keylend Wright

I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking. — Camille Paglia

I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to. — Winona LaDuke

It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying. — Debora Spar

At the lowest level of the investment banking hierarchy are the analysts. To find this young talent, the I-banks send their manicured young bankers out to the Whartons, Harvards and Princetons of the world to roll out the red carpet for the top undergraduates and begin the process of destroying whatever noble ideals the youngsters have left. — John Rolfe

I grew up on the East Coast and was going to go to an Ivy League School, but at the last minute I decided to be a hippy. It was the protest movements on the war, peace movements were going on at our university. It was a fantastic time. — Michael Douglas