Oxford quotes
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I'm an Einstein of the streets and an Oxford scholar of common sense.
-- Al McGuire -
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.
-- Alice Eve -
At Oxford University, the certainties of my atheist faith (and atheism is a faith) began to crumble
-- Alister E. McGrath -
While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.
-- Anne Fortier -
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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.
-- Antonia Fraser -
I am a Topshop homing pigeon! I can walk into the Oxford Circus branch and ferret out the best bits in minutes.
-- Ashley Madekwe -
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 ...
-- Barbara Pym -
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.
-- Benazir Bhutto -
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Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the [Oxford] common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizons of the place.
-- Benjamin Jowett -
Wherever you turn your eye—except in science—an Oxford man is at the top of the tree.
-- Cecil Rhodes -
When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.
-- Charles Finch -
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.
-- Charlie Brooker -
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He was wearing a plain white oxford unbuttoned over a T-shirt, but something about the way they fit made him look put together, like an Abercrombie model (well, like an Abercrombie model who had remembered to put on a shirt that morning).
-- Claire LaZebnik -
I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father's income was such that I wouldn't have got a grant, and he wouldn't let me go to university, and that was the end of it.
-- Colin Baker -
Theres nothing to fear but fears themselves, such as monsters, rejection, food poisoning, redundancy, monsters, and oxford commas.
-- Craig Benzine -
Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.
-- David Bowie -
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Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money...If Oxford undergraduates were paid for their work, I would have performed miracles of scholarship and become Regius Professor of Modern History.
-- David Ogilvy -
I met my wife, Jennifer, while sitting next to her on the airplane on the way to England. I was heading to Oxford as a Marshall scholar.
-- Derek Kilmer -
I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.
-- E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax -
None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
-- Edmund Crispin -
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But the most horrible spot .... lies....immediately south west of Oxford Road and is known as Little Ireland. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench....must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity.
-- Friedrich Engels -
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
-- G. H. Hardy -
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
-- George Santayana -
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?
-- Gloria Trevi -
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There is a story of an Oxford student who once remarked, "I despise all Americans, but have never met one I didn't like."
-- Gordon Allport -
David Blunkett and I both take the same view that it is scandalous that someone from North Tyneside, Laura Spence, with the best qualifications and who wants to be a doctor, should be turned down by Oxford University using an interview system more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than justice. It is about time for an end to that old Britain where what matters more are the privileges you are born with, rather than the potential you actually have.
-- Gordon Brown -
Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew.
-- Harry Carpenter -
I went to prep school, Eton and Oxford. When people hear that, they think they know you, and you think: No, you dont.
-- Harry Lloyd -
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Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
-- Henry James -
...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.
-- Henry James -
In fact the experience at Oxford has really helped me later in life.
-- Imran Khan -
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.
-- James Meade -
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From 1931 to 1937, I was a Fellow and Lecturer in Economics at Hertford College, Oxford.
-- James Meade -
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.
-- Jeffrey Bernard -
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.
-- John Aubrey -
The silver Thames takes some part of this county in its journey to Oxford.
-- John Aubrey -
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In 1960, I went to St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and received the B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1964.
-- John E. Walker -
It is true that I should have been surprised in the past to learn that Professor Hardy had joined the Oxford Group. But one could not say the adverse chance was 1:10. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad, and then this particular event would be quite likely.
-- John Edensor Littlewood -
I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini-wax. See what Hollywood does to you?
-- Kate Beckinsale -
At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.
-- Kate Beckinsale -
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I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
-- Lionel Blue -
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.
-- Lynne Truss -
If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree.
-- Malcolm Gladwell -
From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
-- Margaret Halsey -
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I was educated at Bradfield College and Oxford, where I graduated in 1939.
-- Martin Ryle -
I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
-- Max Beerbohm -
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.
-- Max Beerbohm -
Always have a pink Oxford shint ready for days when you're feeling run down.
-- Michael Bastian -
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I didn't really like being at college. It wasn't like it was Oxford and had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.
-- Mick Jagger -
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.
-- Nancy Pearcey -
When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.
-- Niall Ferguson -
I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.
-- Nigel Rees -
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I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.
-- Nina Bawden -
I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.
-- Nina Bawden -
What I learned at Oxford has been used to great advantage throughout my business career.
-- Paul Getty -
Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.
-- Peter Agre -
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New West End Company ensures that there is a body that can put significant investment into the West End, targeted directly to the needs of the area and particularly the customers. Great progress is being made to improve Oxford Street and make it a great destination.
-- Philip Green -
I had always imagined that Cliché was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford.
-- Philip Guedalla -
I want to prove that you don't have to come from Oxford University or Rada - and you don't have to have parents that support you - to succeed.
-- Samantha Morton -
Ralston looked down his long, elegant nose at the vile creature at his feet, and said, “You just impugned the honor of my future marchioness. Choose your seconds. I will see you at dawn.†Leaving Oxford sputtering on the ground, Ralston spun on one elegant heel to face Benedick. “When I am done with him, I am coming for your sister. And, if you intend to keep me from her, you had better have an army at your side.
-- Sarah MacLean -
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I had gone to Oxford to read music. I had done music all my life, but when I got to college I didn't want to do it anymore.
-- Sophie Kinsella -
People used to ask me for advice, and I'd say, 'Please, don't ask me!' Yes, I did economics at Oxford, but that's not the same as having a broad knowledge of personal finance
-- Sophie Kinsella -
The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.
-- Steven Pressfield -
There was still food rationing in England and life was difficult all through my 2 year stay in Oxford.
-- Sydney Brenner -
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I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
-- Taiye Selasi -
So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee.
-- Thomas de Quincey -
Physick, says Sydenham, is not to bee learned by going to Universities, but hee is for taking apprentices; and says one had as good send a man to Oxford to learn shoemaking as practising physick.
-- Thomas Sydenham -
Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls.
-- Timothy B. Tyson -
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I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.
-- Vera Brittain -
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
-- William Butler Yeats -
Sure enough at Oxford, I was another Yank half a step behind.
-- William J. Clinton -
Economists use the word consume to mean "utilize economic goods," but the Shorter Oxford Dictionary's definition is more appropriate to ecologists: "To make away with or destroy; to waste or to squander; to use up." The economies that cater to the global consumer society are responsible for the lion's share of the damage that humans have inflicted on common global resources.
-- Alan Thein Durning -
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Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.
-- Frances O'Grady -
Time is the only thing you can't buy.
-- Nicole Lapin -
I recommend Doug Sweeney's recent book [Jonathan] Edwards the Exegete (Oxford University Press, 2015), which is a terrific treatment of the way in which Edwards was steeped in the Bible, so that it shaped the whole of his thinking.
-- Oliver D. Crisp -
I had published a co-edited book with Oxford a decade ago, my first book actually. Years later I found myself having lunch with Lori Stone, who was an editor at Oxford at that time. We connected at a conference and over the course of lunch she told me about a wonderful new series she had just developed called Understanding Research.
-- Patricia Leavy -
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I was invited. Oxford University Press is simply as prestigious a press as there is so when they come to your door and invite you to be a part of something like this, you say yes. It truly is an honor to work with them, particularly on a project as large as this one. The story of how they came to me is a good lesson though about the unexpected and creating new opportunities.
-- Patricia Leavy -
Jonathan Coe's genial, likeable novel can only be described as a kind of lit-prog-rock concept album... Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of having planted a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box I carried around in my school days... As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read.
-- Peter Bradshaw -
The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.
-- Robert Darnton -
We need to make it safe to cycle across London. Why not pedestrianise parts of London like Oxford Street and Parliament Square? I intend to plant 200 million trees across London in my term as mayor.
-- Sadiq Khan -
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In the UK cycling was very popular until the end of the 1950's but it really lost out to our love affair with the car. Regaining a culture where cycling is seen as an everyday part of life requires time and effort. Of course in some British towns it never really went away - just look at Oxford and Cambridge. In other places, where the car has been king for many decades, it takes more time.
-- Adrian Bell -
I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't deciding that I'm the next big thing.
-- Eddie Marsan -
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.
-- Gretchen Carlson -
Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?
-- Terry Jones -
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My first paid job was delivering newspapers. The first paid acting job I got was dressing up as Edam cheese and handing out leaflets on London's Oxford Street. I got pushed over by these little herberts and given a good shoe-in.
-- Jason Flemyng
