These Harvard quotes will inspire you. Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Harvard quotes, Harvard sayings, and Harvard proverbs.
Best Harvard Quotes
- “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” ~ Herman Melville
- “I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn’t believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.” ~ Ulrich Beck
- “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” ~ Derek Bok , Harvard quotes education
-
“A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.” ~ Beatrice Wood
- “There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can’t tell you why.” ~ Jim Harrison
- “The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.” ~ Larry Wall
- “As a journalist I’m comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.” ~ Anita Diament
-
“It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.” ~ William C. Kirby
- “That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.” ~ Elliott Carter
- “The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult.” ~ Philip Warren Anderson
-
“I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.” ~ Harry Mathews
- “If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause.” ~ Charles Morgan
- “I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition… Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.” ~ John Forbes Nash
- “I went to an all-girls pre school where everyone went off to Harvard or Yale, and I had zero interest in doing so. I think they thought I was on drugs. There was a neighboring all-boys school, so we’d get together and do dumb things. It was your typical Catholic-American upbringing.” ~ Katherine Moennig
-
“I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.” ~ Ajay Naidu
- “We’ve had risk assessments performed by Harvard University, which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small.” ~ Ann Veneman
- “You looked at Stanford or Harvard, or the University of Colorado, these were powerful engines just turning out people ready to create and grow businesses.” ~ John Hickenlooper
- “Two young doctors – one from Harvard and the other from Dartmouth – invited me to go to Mecca in my husband’s stead. And that is what helped put me back on track.” ~ Betty Shabazz
-
“When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.” ~ M. H. Abrams
- “I’m going to try to pull a Natalie Portman. Natalie went to Harvard while shooting ‘Star Wars’. I don’t know how she did it. I want to have lunch with her and ask her – that seems like a bunch of stress right there.” ~ Selena Gomez
- “Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.” ~ Woody Allen
- “These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.” ~ Barry Sonnenfeld
-
“At Harvard I majored in chemistry with a strong inclination toward math.” ~ William Standish Knowles
- “In not having an appointment at Harvard, I’m in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color.” ~ Catharine MacKinnon
- “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.
- “In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It’s so schizophrenic.” ~ Jonathan Carroll
-
“We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “I was a student at Harvard, and that’s where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.” ~ Henry Flynt
- “I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.” ~ Joseph Stiglitz
- “A Harvard Medical School study has determined that rectal thermometers are still the best way to tell a baby’s temperature. Plus, it really teaches the baby who’s boss.” ~ Tina Fey
-
“It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.” ~ Malcolm Forbes
- “It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.” ~ Barney Frank
- “But after the time there I’d had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn’t last very long.” ~ Stephen Sprouse
- “Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that’s nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.” ~ David Dinkins
-
“I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.” ~ Felix Frankfurter
- “After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.” ~ Harry Mathews
- “To me the key thing is getting it right. And if a person’s really smart and they’re doing fantastic work I don’t care if they’re a high school kid or a Harvard professor, it’s the work that matters.” ~ Jimmy Wales
- “There’s a rule they don’t teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.” ~ Edwin Land
-
“Ask five economists and you’ll get five different answers – six if one went to Harvard.” ~ Edgar Fiedler
- “You know, I’m from the Midwest, man – that shapes my personality much more than having gone to Harvard.” ~ Dean Norris
- “The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren’t and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “My father used to say, “Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard.”” ~ Marianne Moore
-
“Harvard was an extraordinary window on the world.” ~ Pierre Trudeau
- “As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner’s laboratory.” ~ Andrew Weil
- “People use the word “natural” … What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.” ~ Timothy Leary
- “If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn’t have invented The New York Review of Books.” ~ Anna Quindlen
-
“When Harvard men say they have graduated from Radcliffe, then we’ve made it.” ~ Jackie Kennedy
- “When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn’t even know how to aim the camera in those days.” ~ Ann Beattie
- “I don’t believe I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.” ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
- “Harvard gave me an education, but Junior Chamber gave me an education for life.” ~ John F. Kennedy
-
“At Harvard I was in charge of the comparative anatomy labs.” ~ Robert T. Bakker
- “I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.” ~ Josiah Royce
- “I just went to Harvard a little while, because I graduated from Armstrong High School in Washington and then I went up there but I didn’t stay that long because I went into show business.” ~ Billy Eckstine
- “I won’t say there aren’t any Harvard graduates who have never asserted a superior attitude. But they have done so to our great embarrassment and in no way represent the Harvard I know.” ~ Derek Bok
-
“I’ve lectured at the Harvard Business School several times.” ~ Christie Hefner
- “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
- “Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.” ~ Roy Blount, Jr.
- “I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.” ~ Harry Shearer
- “Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.” ~ John Updike
-
“Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.” ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
- “There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late ’60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind.” ~ Bonnie Raitt
- “I would sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.
-
“A Harvard education consists of what you learn at Harvard while you are not studying.” ~ James Bryant Conant
- “The late Rev. Peter Gomes at The Memorial Church at Harvard was a true mentor to me when I was in college. He instilled in me a commitment to service, saying that it’s not enough to believe in service, or support those who serve – you ought to find a way yourself to serve. When I looked at different options after college, nobody inspired me more than the 18- and 19-year-olds who serve on the front lines of our nation’s military. Serving with them in the Marines as we together served our country was the greatest honor of my life to date.” ~ Seth Moulton
