Quotes & Sayings About Liberal Arts College

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it," [John] Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantage. — Fareed Zakaria

I'd had the quintessential liberal arts experience, and I came out of college not having a clue of what to do. — John Wesley

So apparently all homeschooled kids spoke like pretentious liberal arts college students. — Koren Zailckas

I wasn't using college as a stepping stone to law school or some other career. I just wanted a liberal-arts education. — Charlie Trotter

The boy, called Urbain, is now fourteen years old and wonderfully clever. He deserves to be given the best of educations, and in the neighborhood of Saintes the best education available is to be had at the Jesuit College of Bordeaux. This celebrated seat of learning comprised a high school for boys, a liberal arts college, a seminary, and a School of Advanced Studies for ordained postgraduates. Here the precociously brilliant Urbain Grandier spent more than ten years, first as schoolboy, and later as undergraduate, theological student and, after his ordination in 1615, as Jesuit novice. Not that he intended to enter the Company; for he felt no vocation to subject himself to so rigid a discipline. No, his career was to be made, not in a religious order, but as a secular priest. — Aldous Huxley

I do regret that when I went to college, I didn't have a liberal arts education. I got a BFA in musical theater, so it was a very directed toward what I was doing. I wish that I had expanded my horizons a little bit. — Heather Dubrow

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

Not having finished high school and having been fairly utilitarian in the way I went about college, I didn't have a deep liberal arts background. So we'd go to lunch and people would talk about their favorite seventeenth-century poets, and I'd be thinking, 'Could I even name five poets? From any century?' — Joy Covey

When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits. — Andrea Mitchell

I went to school at Radnor High School. And I went to a liberal arts college in St. Louis, Missouri, called Lindenwood College. — Lee Daniels

My parents had an old-fashioned ideal of college, that four years at a liberal arts college should be a liberal arts education. — Julie Bowen

The really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get at a [liberal arts college] isn't really about the capacity to think but, rather, the choice of what to think about — David Foster Wallace

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts.
I'm kidding, of course. — William Deresiewicz

The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks. — Albert Einstein

Chadron had a water tower, grain elevators, a tanning salon, a video rental store, a small liberal arts college, a Hardee's, a stoplight, and a curling yellow sign in the pet store window that read, 'Hamsters and Tarantulas Featured Today.' — Poe Ballantine

Josh Radnor is that rare thing: a writer-director who thinks like an actor but still knows how to create a comedy with shape and vision. Liberal Arts is the best movie about college I've seen since I don't know what ... Dryly affectionate and super-sharp. Elizabeth Olsen is every inch a star. — Owen Gleiberman

Almost everything on Craigslist paid more than I was making, but my qualifications were sketchy. I had a college degree in liberal arts. That and a dollar could get me a soda. — Janet Evanovich

I decided that I didn't want to spend my time in a liberal arts college. — Chick Corea

First semester, I learned that Jack Rogers sandals, so revered in college, screamed, "My small liberal arts school will always be the center of the universe!" I'd found a new axis, so into the trash went my gold, silver, and white pairs. — Jessica Knoll

The role of a liberal arts college within a university is to be a genuine part of that university, giving and responding to the other parts. — Edward Levi

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education. — Joseph Stiglitz

He didn't understand that it's all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that rises its head and nods like cobra when you're sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it's even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education. — David Sedaris

Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature. — A. Scott Berg

I went to a little liberal-arts college in Missouri called Truman State University. — Jenna Fischer

I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy. — Stephen Cole Kleene

I was sitting with the rest of my college graduating class listening to the commencement speaker prepare us for life after graduation, and he had a lot of ground to cover because my liberal arts education had skirted the issue for 4 years. I was just waiting for them to call my name so I could go up, collect my diploma, fold it into a paper hat, and start flipping burgers at McDonalds. — Doug Lansky

I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience. — Mandy Patinkin

I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics. — James Heckman

College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few. — David Brooks

For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all students, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life. — Derek Bok