These MIT quotes will inspire you. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging MIT quotes, MIT sayings, and MIT proverbs.
Famous MIT Quotes
- “Getting an education at MIT is like taking a drink from a fire hose.” ~ Jerome Wiesner
- “Nothing gives us greater pride than the importance of India’s scientific and engineering colleges, or the army of Indian scientists at organizations such as Microsoft and NASA. Our temples are not the god-encrusted shrines of Varanasi, but Western scientific institutions like Caltech and MIT, and magazines like ‘Nature’ and ‘Scientific American.” ~ Aravind Adiga
- “The thing that we at MIT must understand is the amount of real damage that is being done to us in the fine structure of how research funds are expended.” ~ Charles M. Vest
- “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.” ~ Thomas Sowell
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“There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.” ~ Amar Bose
- “We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them.” ~ Amar Bose
- “We got half the doggone MIT college of engineering here, and nobody who can fix a doggone /television/?” Dr. Joseph Abernathy glared accusingly at the clusters of young people scattered around his living room. That’s /electrical/ engineering, Pop,” his son told him loftily. “We’re all mechanical engineers. Ask a mechanical engineer to fix your color TV, that’s like asking an Ob-Gyn to look at the sore on your di-ow!” Oh, sorry,” said his father, peering blandly over gold-rimmed glasses. “That your foot, Lenny?” ~ Diana Gabaldon
- “Scientists at MIT and engineering schools all across America say that they could improve the fuel economy standards for the existing set of vehicles by 10 miles per gallon using existing technology, without compromising safety or comfort at all.” ~ Ed Markey
- “Literally from the moment I came in the door of MIT, it was very clear that a highly productive 40-year partnership between U.S. research universities and the federal government was badly eroding.” ~ Charles M. Vest
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“My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.” ~ K. Eric Drexler
- “My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.” ~ Eric Allin Cornell
- “At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations.” ~ Amar Bose , MIT quotes student
- “I loved music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound was so poor.” ~ Amar Bose
- “When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.” ~ Marvin Minsky
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“Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.” ~ Joseph Stiglitz
- “The Science Coalition, which grew out of an initial concept at Harvard and at MIT, has now grown to an informal group of about 60 research universities.” ~ Charles M. Vest
- “I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago.” ~ Jack Steinberger
- “College had little effect on me. I’d have been the same writer if I’d gone to MIT, except I’d have flunked out sooner.” ~ Robert B. Parker
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“MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.” ~ Nicholas Negroponte
- “I want MIT to be the dream of every child who wants to grow up to make the world a better place. We need to reach those young explorers and bring them with us on the great adventure of discovery and innovation.” ~ Susan Hockfield
- “S. J. Keyser is a shrewd and insightful observer of academe. His experiences in three universities, Brandeis, UMass, and MIT, enrich his perspectives about the way universities work, and his exploration of the culture of MIT is brilliant.” ~ Paul E. Gray
- “I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a very good place…. It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole place thinks that it’s the most wonderful place in the world—it’s the center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United States, if not the world … and while you don’t get a good sense of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it, and having motivation and desire to keep on” ~ Richard P. Feynman
- “When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.” ~ Ray Kurzweil
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“Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer.” “What’s it mean?” “The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones.” ~ Julie Orringer
- “Two factors explain our success. One, MIT’s renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.” ~ Paul Samuelson
- “For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don’t have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we’re satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong.” ~ Scott Berkun
- “We [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.” ~ William J. Mitchell
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“The Saylor Foundation is meant to be a gadfly to encourage Google, Apple, MIT, Harvard, the United States government, and the Chinese government to aggressively pursue digital education.” ~ Michael J. Saylor
- “A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that’s where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.” ~ Cynthia Kenyon
- “For the nature of a women is closely allied to art.
[Ger., Denn das Naturell der Frauen
Ist so nah mit Kunst verwandt.]” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - “Find something that you love to do, and find a place that you really like to do it in. I found something I loved to do. Im a mechanical engineer by training, and I loved it. I still do. My son is a nuclear engineer at MIT, a junior, and I get the same vibe from him. Your work has to be compelling. You spend a lot of time doing it.” ~ Ursula Burns
- “A large number of students around the world don’t really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities.” ~ Anant Agarwal
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“The rabble also vent their rage in words.
[Ger., Es macht das Volk sich auch mit Worten Lust.]” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “EdX will be a creating a platform which will be open-source, not for profit, and a portal for a website where universities will offer their courses. For example, MIT courses will be offered as MITx and Harvard courses as HarvardX.” ~ Anant Agarwal
- “We already have a professor who’s using an online social network of MIT alums to help educate students in programming. Just imagine expanding that in Facebook-fashion to tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world.” ~ Anant Agarwal
- “My family has always supported my activities, whether it was doing combat in Korea, flying progressively and challenging fighter-jet aircraft in Europe, or studying for a doctor’s degree at MIT. They have been always very supportive and understanding of the challenges and risks involved in my career. A family needs to work as a team, supporting each other’s individual aims and aspirations.” ~ Buzz Aldrin
- “I’ve led a life of such structured discipline and always had a goal in mind of knowing what I was doing, from West Point to the Air Force combat, MIT, looking for new things to study and get involved in. And then I got into the space program, and how disciplined can you get?” ~ Buzz Aldrin
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“My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together.” ~ Michael J. Massimino
- “Silicon Valley, after all, feeds off the existence of computers, the internet, the IT systems, satellites, the whole of micro electronics and so on, but a lot of that comes straight out of the state sector of the economy. Silicon Valley developed, but they expanded and turned it into commercial products and so on, but the innovation is on the basis of fundamental technological development that took places in places like this [MIT] on government funding, and that continues.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “My children threw me a life line: “Return to your roots – food – and rewrite your first book, Diet for a Small Planet.” I learned that if I could just show up, in this case, if I could just get myself out of bed, get to the computer in my tiny office at MIT, and start writing, help would start arriving.” ~ Frances Moore Lappé
- “If you take a look at places like Harvard, it’s striking. In the early ,50s, I think there were a handful of Jewish professors, three or four. But by the 1960s, there were Jewish deans and administrators. In fact, one of the reasons why MIT became a great university was because they admitted Jews whereas Harvard did not.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “How shall we plan, that all be fresh and new–
Important matter yet attractive too?
[Ger., Wie machen wir’s, dass alles frisch und neu
Und mit Bedeutung auch gefallig sei?]” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
“Don’t ask me when because I don’t remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I’m deeply grateful for.” ~ Junot Diaz
- “Where you live matters: there’s only one MIT. And there’s only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn’t a coincidence: for whatever you’re doing, there’s usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don’t settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too – follow them.” ~ Drew Houston
- “Where you live matters: there’s only one MIT. And there’s only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn’t a coincidence: for whatever you’re doing, there’s usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don’t settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too – follow them.” ~ Drew Houston
- “Everything that I’ve learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won’t work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won’t. PC/Windows: You think it won’t work, and it won’t.” ~ Philip Greenspun
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“Der Krieg ist nichts als eine Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit Einmischung anderer Mittel. War is merely the continuation of policy with the admixture of other means.” ~ Carl von Clausewitz
- “In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn’t have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five people showed up. It was the first thing I ever organized, and it took off!” ~ Peter Diamandis
- “I’ve had young women come to me and say that before they watched ‘Voyager’ it didn’t really occur to them that they could be successful in a higher position in the field of science; girls going to MIT, girls pursuing astrophysics with a view to a career in NASA.” ~ Kate Mulgrew
- “You think the weather is weird now? Just wait. A new MIT study, just published in a peer-reviewed journal, projects that the Earth could see warming of more than 9 degrees F by 2100 – more than twice earlier projections.” ~ Jeff Goodell
- “I was at a speaking engagement for MIT… and I said, ‘The Professor has all sorts of degrees, including one from this very institution [MIT]! And that’s why I can make a radio out of a coconut, and not fix a hole in a boat!'” ~ Russell Johnson
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“There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon’s insight to Einstein’s. Others found that comparison unfair – unfair to Shannon.” ~ William Poundstone
- “I thought of killing myself but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn’t commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, don’t commute.” ~ Murray Gell-Mann
- “It struck me that Steve Jobs, known to be such a brilliant speaker, had a very difficult time explaining things when he was younger. He was describing technology that didn’t exist. He had MIT engineers, and he was trying to tell them what he wanted; but there were no terms for what he wanted yet. I think a lot of his early frustration was trying to quickly get his vision to the finish line.” ~ Joshua Michael Stern
- “Yet another video has emerged of MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber calling Americans ‘stupid,’ and bragging about how the Affordable Care Act’s drafters had to deceive the public in order to pass the law.” ~ Alexander Viets Griswold
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“Odds are you’re going to like this lively spin on the true story of six MIT mathletes who broke the Vegas Bank. It’s a kick to watch Kevin Spacey and a gifted young cast use smarts to deal audiences a winning hand.” ~ Peter Travers
- “I studied engineering at MIT. There, the late, great physicist Philip Morrison introduced me to the idea that, in any system, there exists the inevitability that an event will occur which is completely unrelated to anything that preceded it. It completely changed my perception of “impossible.”” ~ Tohoru Masamune
- “In my first career I had founded my own company, with a group of MIT professors, before coming to Harvard to finish my doctorate, and so I had a deep respect for the brains, talent, and dedication of managers. That made it hard for me to believe the attributions in the business press that stupid management was to blame. So I looked elsewhere for an explanation.” ~ Clayton Christensen
- “In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “[In geology,] As in history, the material in hand remains silent if no questions are asked. The nature of these questions depends on the “school” to which the geologist belongs and on the objectivity of his investigations. Hans Cloos called this way of interrogation “the dialogue with the earth,” “das Gesprach mit der Erde.”” ~ Reinout Willem van Bemmelen
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“The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.” ~ Eric S. Raymond
- “Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn’t realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn’t understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.” ~ Paul Samuelson
- “I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts, solid worker, from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.” ~ James A. Michener
- “I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that. It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.” ~ Alan Lightman
