Ivory Tower Quotes

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  • Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

    "Why Marx Was Right". Book by Terry Eagleton, 2011.
  • The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.

  • When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

    Afterthoughts (1931) "Other People"
  • If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.

  • Even ivory towers need central heating.

    Breyten Breytenbach (1996). “Memroy of Birds in Times of Revolution”
  • The artist's life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward.

    Book   Thinking   Artist  
  • Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. Oh, the Oxford comma. Here, in case you don't know what it is yet, is the perennial example, as espoused by Harold Ross: "The flag is red, white, and blue." So what do you think of it? Are you for or against it? Do you hover in between?

    Taken   Thinking   Ivory  
  • I've always been interested in pop culture. Some of my colleagues think of pop culture as beneath them, or there's the ivory tower and then there's everybody else, and I never could buy into that wall that's been put up by so many people over the decades and even the centuries.

    Wall   Thinking   Ivory  
    Source: bookriot.com
  • Strategy should evolve out of the mud of the marketplace, not in the antiseptic environment of an ivory tower.

    Al Ries, Jack Trout (2006). “Marketing Warfare: 20th Anniversary Edition: Authors' Annotated Edition”, McGraw Hill Professional
  • For me or a Bruce Springsteen to sit up in our ivory towers and make comments about racism, well, were not really in it, are we?

    "John Mellencamp takes a hard look at race issues on Cuttin' Heads" by Eric Schumacher Rasmussen, www.mtv.com. October 15, 2001.
  • Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.

  • It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.

  • The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

    W H Auden (1981). “Antæus”, Ecco Press
  • The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.

    War   Heart   Destiny  
    Eric Burns (1995). “The Joy of Books: Confessions of a Lifelong Reader”
  • Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.

    "A Theory of Roughness". Interview with John Brockman, www.edge.org. December 20, 2004.
  • I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.

  • Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.

  • It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?

    Source: screenanarchy.com
  • There's an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school's president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department - his field - and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis.

    Block   Book   School  
    Source: thehumanist.com
  • Programs, systems and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text. But the invitation to know God - truly know Him - is always an invitation to suffer. Not to suffer alone, but to suffer with Him.

    Joni Eareckson Tada (2010). “When God Weeps: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty”, p.137, Zondervan
  • Friedmans influence reaches far beyond the academic community and the world of economics. Rather than lock himself in an ivory tower, he has joined the fray to fight for the survival of this great country of ours.

  • Jan built herself an ivory tower to keep the wolves out; she never dreamed they were already inside.

  • Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues.

    War   Fighting   Impact  
  • I'm not a believer in putting designers off in an ivory tower. They need to have a voice at the table so they can identify where and why design can make a difference. We also need to understand the business issues. If we don't make our numbers this quarter, we don't earn the right to do something cool the next time.

  • Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science. The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower, questioning the idea of Art with a capital 'A', photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

    Photography   Art   Taken  
  • I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist - a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.

  • Great question in science - questions like the ones Herschel raised about the structure of the universe - are seldom answered by ivory-tower types engaging in pure thought. They are answered by people who are willing to get down into the trenches and grapple with nature. If that means casting your own telescope mirrors, as Herschel did, so be it.

  • The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

  • We look down on our scientists if they engage in outside consultation. We implicitly promote the ivory tower.

  • Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

    Paulo Freire, Elizabeth Galligan, Romelia Hurtado de Vivas (2008). “Pioneers in Education: Essays in Honor of Paulo Freire”, p.109, Nova Publishers
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