Ivy League Quotes

“I couldn't hear anything or anyone, there was only the sound of our sex and the smell of books.”
― Juliet Gauvin, The Freshman: Volume II

“Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.”
― Russell Baker

“There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“I lived in Boston until last year,” he said, in a falsely low-key way, because “Boston” was code for Harvard (otherwise he would say MIT or Tufts or anywhere else), just as another woman said, “I was in New Haven,” in that coy manner that pretended not to be coy, which meant that she had been at Yale.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“At the lowest level of the investment banking hierarchy are the analysts. To find this young talent, the I-banks send their manicured young bankers out to the Whartons, Harvards and Princetons of the world to roll out the red carpet for the top undergraduates and begin the process of destroying whatever noble ideals the youngsters have left.”
― John Rolfe, Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle

“You cannot write an accurate history of The Holocaust without accounting for the Harvard students and professors that help make the science an acceptable world-wide movement.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Maybe power like Lethe, power like the societies, like the dean of Yale University, made explanations unnecessary.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“There's a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers - holders of power, not its critics.”
― William Deresiewicz, What the Ivy League Won't Teach You

“There is a willful lack of safety culture in the USA. It is in the Ivy League, research institutions, universities, utility companies, solar power companies, cell phone companies, manufacturing and the government!”
― Steven Magee

“Had he worn a sweater tied around his neck he could have served as the undeniable unintentional intimidating model poster boy for all the ever disappearing middle-class parents who saw the brochure for any ivy league school and were dreading money they had to shell out.”
― J.S. Mason, Whisky Hernandez

“Were the future leaders of the United States who had won coveted tickets to the highest echelons of the neoliberal meritocracy — the ones who were supposed to take over the newspapers, high political offices, and corporations — really demonstrating in the quads not about the military-industrial complex, wealth inequality, or America's endless foreign wars, but cosplay?”
― Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office

“I was employed at Dartmouth College for a year. They obtained my work visa and ‘exceptional ability’ green card, and I have a company pension plan from them. A reference check revealed they were telling people I had never been employed by them!”
― Steven Magee