Knowledge is dangerous.

The professors are the enemy.

Many professors forget that their professional responsibility is not only to generate new knowledge but also to seek to maximally disseminate it.

We are sickened by the unknown, but knowledge can prove poisonous.

Sometimes I fear that, if Harvard does not give up trying to turn itself from an Institution of Learning into an Educational Institution, we may have a generation of professors whose duty it will be to disseminate information which they have not the time to acquire.

If a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.

"As long as theoretic knowledge remains the privilege of a handful of "academicians" in the Party, the latter will face the danger of going astray."

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.

It is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning.

In this distancing, are aspects of our own reality as persons deeply concealed, and the concealment concealed? Are many professors of philosophy today afraid to reflect? I think so.

The position of these ‘academics’ in Bengal has, of course, been helped by the fact that the CPI(M) has been in power there for so long. But their sway has not been confined to the teaching and ‘research’ institutions of that state. It is no surprise, therefore, to see the same ‘line’ being poured down the throats of students at the national level. And so strong is the tug of intellectual fashion, so lethal can the controlling mafia be to the career of an academic that often, even though the academic may not quite subscribe to their propositions and ‘theses’, he will end up reciting those propositions. Else his manuscript will not be accepted as a textbook by the NCERT, for instance, it will not be reviewed….

The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

We are weighed upon by too many things. It is as if the wisdom of the infinite were struggling to beat itself into finite and cup-big minds.

The greatest danger to any discipline is the creation of a static model that keeps the same vocabulary for any length of time. In such a case, the intellectual becomes an ex-intellectual in no time.