You can assume that if a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males.
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.
Just because many modern academics are very secular does not mean that we should ignore those factors in earlier generations - and by that, I don't just mean five or six centuries ago.
I've tried to make a book that's accessible to the ordinary, intelligent reader. Very often books that cover this kind of subject are written by academics, for academics. But I am not an academic.
I'm not going to school just for the academics - I wanted to share ideas, to be around people who are passionate about learning.
Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.
I find it hilarious that there are academics who try to analyse chemical changes in the brains of students while exposing them to gags.
Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.
There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.
I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.
The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.
Academics act like they are important, but when something is academic it is meaningless. People say, 'It's academic, now let's get work done.
Academics are not necessarily nice people.
Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.
Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it's a subject below their social standing.
It's so easy for a kid to join a gang, to do drugs. We should make it that easy to be involved in football and academics.
I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant - it no longer existed.
It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed. " As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.
Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.