Oxford Quotes

Wherever you turn your eye—except in science—an Oxford man is at the top of the tree.

My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn’t cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford.

I went to Florida State for college. Then I went to Oxford in England for a master’s degree. I was drafted by the Titans and was with them for two years, and then one year in Pittsburgh with the Steelers.

I met my wife, Jennifer, while sitting next to her on the airplane on the way to England. I was heading to Oxford as a Marshall scholar.

I didn’t really like being at college. It wasn’t like it was Oxford and had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

We need to make it safe to cycle across London. Why not pedestrianise parts of London like Oxford Street and Parliament Square? I intend to plant 200 million trees across London in my term as mayor.

The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse, For Tories own no argument but force; With equal care, to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs allow no force but argument.

I did really well at school, and I would have loved to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I would have read English, and I’m really interested in politics.

How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.

I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don’t think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember

I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master’s in philosophy.

The death of the MG marks the end of one of the most perfect products of free enterprise, born out of the voracious will to succeed of one man and the burgeoning market for middle-class status symbols. The car first appeared as a souped-up Morris Oxford in 1923 when it won the Land’s End Rally.

Beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them as luxury.

In fact the experience at Oxford has really helped me later in life.

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

I decided to finish at Oxford because I looked up at the top of the buildings – the gargoyles and spires – and decided to stay.

It is a strange world, Oxford – quite claustrophobic. I was often glad I was only there for eight weeks at a time.

The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is an astonishing building, designed by Christopher Wren. Its painted ceiling has just been restored so that the darkish miasma that was Robert Streeter’s original allegory of truth and light striking the university is now bright with playful cherubs and lustrous clouds.

Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.

Relatively, there are many scientists who believe in God. And in Oxford, where I am the Professor, there are more professors like me, who believe in God, than you think. There are not dozens of them, but they are there, and in Cambridge too, and elsewhere. We are not in a tiny minority.

I went to prep school, Eton and Oxford. When people hear that, they think they know you, and you think: ‘No, you don’t.’

I met my husband Itzik when I got back home to Israel from Oxford in 2002. He is my Internet-of-all-Things.

As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis.

I prefer simpler shirts, like a solid oxford or pinstripe, and with a solid cashmere crewneck or V-neck.

What I learned at Oxford has been used to great advantage throughout my business career.

If I find a dress I really like and it happens to be a bit short, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. The thing about going to Oxford is it does give you the confidence to be how you want to be.

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.

It’s lovely going to Oxford, it’s very difficult to film there as you’re doing a period drama in a city which is very crowded.

Since my education, I’ve done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians – certainly when I was there – went to Cambridge. I don’t know whether it’s the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford, because it seemed more of an easy bridge.

A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It’s just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses.

Oxford is a very special place. You really sensed the value of a good education there.

I can be very drunk in a club in Oxford on a Monday night and some guy comes up to you and buys you a drink and says that the last record you made changed his life. That means something.

In 1960, I went to St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and received the B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1964.

On my mother’s side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father’s, from tenant farmers near Oxford.

To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.

I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.

I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.

There are many important books on oral history. My book was the launch title in the Understanding Qualitative Research series with Oxford University Press. I think what makes my book and all of the series books unique is the emphasis on writing instruction for researchers who want to use the method being described.

You would think that American educators would want our kids, especially our kids from poorer families, to hear what top-rated Oxford students hear. But you’d be wrong. American schools now hide their students from ideas like mine if they don’t approve of the man or the message.

Gert was always of the mind that she wouldn’t go to another church except the Catholic Church. So when I would date her in New York City, and later when we went to Oxford before we got married, we always went to the Catholic church.

I didn’t pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.

…when all the openings were closed, then the worlds would all be restored to their proper relations with one another, Lyra’s Oxford and Will’s would lie over each other again, like transparent images on two sheets of film being moved closer and closer until they merged–although they would never truly touch.

Beautiful city! . . . spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . her ineffable charm. . . . Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic!

I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I’d be a massive movie star. But there’s a longevity to what I do. It’s more reliable. Someone isn’t deciding that I’m the next big thing.

I thought I might find the real me in Oxford. Civil rights made me accept being a black intellectual. There was no such thing before, but then it was something. So I became one.

I’m extraordinarily lucky to have so many friends across such a diverse group of people. One day I’ll be at Oxford, the next at some complete idiot’s lunch.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

I trained at the Oxford School of Drama.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

Even prior to my herniated disc, Id been to an acupuncturist in Oxford for general muscular pain, and to an osteopath.

I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini wax. See what Hollywood does to you?

Time is the only thing you can’t buy.

I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I’m not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.

Contrary to popular belief, Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.

I kept going because I just love football. But you get to the point where you’re not getting the rewards or seeing any progression and that knocks your enthusiasm. That’s why I decided to come to Oxford.

I love Oxford Circus, so I can do Primarni, and I can do River Island and Topshop and Selfridges.

My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the ’50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.

You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.

Let’s say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, ‘I’ve come here because I’m in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,’ – they would show you the way to the insane asylum.

What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean, I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It’s the summit of something else. It’s distilled Englishness.

I had gone to Oxford to read music. I had done music all my life, but when I got to college I didn’t want to do it anymore.

I remember very well, when I was at Oxford, an old gentleman said to me, “Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task.

I studied law at Warwick University, then philosophy at Oxford. I met my wife Leah there. She is American, so I followed her to New York.

So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee.

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’ has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

I’d gone to Oxford to do graduate studies in the history of the slave trade, but I came across Georgiana’s letters, gave up that thesis, and wrote one on her instead. When I learned that Georgiana’s great-nephews supported opposite sides in the American Civil War, I knew this would be the perfect sequel.

I found a ‘lost’ manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee’s interest in magic. Of course, it wasn’t really lost. It was there, in the catalog.

Always have a pink Oxford shint ready for days when you’re feeling run down.

New West End Company ensures that there is a body that can put significant investment into the West End, targeted directly to the needs of the area and particularly the customers. Great progress is being made to improve Oxford Street and make it a great destination.

The fact is I never intended to be a chef. After Oxford University I had this weird idea of running a nightclub.

People say I’ve got a bad reputation. I think I’ve got the best reputation in the building.

Going to Oxford didn’t necessarily make a person clever.

My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater.

All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature – even my thesis was on Shakespeare.

Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the [Oxford] common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizons of the place.

He was wearing a plain white oxford unbuttoned over a T-shirt, but something about the way they fit made him look put together, like an Abercrombie model (well, like an Abercrombie model who had remembered to put on a shirt that morning).

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture – I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

Okay, everyone please be completely quiet, because I can literally hear a whisper, and it’ll throw off my stream of consciousness, and when I get my stream of consciousness going that’s when I give the best, illest quotes. Literally, a whisper can throw it off.

I met my wife in Oxford, fell in love with her, and followed her to New York. I was an illegal there for the first few years, until we got married, so I ended up doing lots of interesting jobs, some for a few days, some for a few months.

A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London’s best restaurants are as good as Paris’s, but not in the 1950s.

There are few greater temptations on earth than to stay permanently at Oxford in meditation, and to read all the books in the Bodlean.

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

Our daughter’s name Arwynn comes from Arwen in ‘Lord of the Rings’ because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.

That was the fun of acting, being a blank canvas you could transform into the character – Indian princess, 20s vamp, Mother Courage, Oxford don, 94-year-old wife.

I recommend Doug Sweeney’s recent book [Jonathan] Edwards the Exegete (Oxford University Press, 2015), which is a terrific treatment of the way in which Edwards was steeped in the Bible, so that it shaped the whole of his thinking.

In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn’t sit too well with them!

After I returned from Oxford, I spent 5-6 years in a village in Madhya Pradesh – 25 km. outside Bhopal – along with a group of people working with the communities. But, over time, we realised that there were just too many constraints, and for ordinary citizens to be the change agent was not that easy.

I’ve been around – having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that – some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they’re just as nutty as the rest of us – sometimes worse.

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

It was in the beginning of the month of November, 17–, when a young English gentleman, who had just left the university of Oxford, made use of the liberty afforded him, to visit some parts of the north of England; and curiosity extended his tour into the adjacent frontier of the sister country.

Having spent years in academia – at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Oxford University and Harvard Law School – I encountered a wide range of worldviews.

There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that’s all.

The clever men of Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed but they none of them know one half as much as intelligent Mr. Toad.

I was at this dinner for Rhodes Scholars. And we were in the Rhodes mansion, which is this fancy mansion on the Oxford campus. And I remember I looked up in the rotunda, and I saw that etched into the marble were the names of Rhodes Scholars who had left Oxford, and had fought and died in World War II.

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.

After a year of post-graduate research, I won an 1851 Exhibition scholarship to work at Oxford with Robert Robinson. Two such scholarships were awarded each year, and the other was won by Rita Harradence, also of Sydney and also an organic chemist.

What I like about Oxford is how small it is; it’s really more of a big town than a city.

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don’t have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don’t have children who are overweight.

A guy playing pool in a pub once said to me that they should put me on the telly. It went in one ear and out the other. But then I started thinking about it. I wondered how it all worked, did you have to be best mates with someone at the BBC who you went to uni with in Oxford?

My dad, in particular, was adamant that I should finish my education. He encouraged me to go to Oxford, for instance, and I rather doubt I’d have gone if he hadn’t. I would have gone straight back to L.A. and tried to start my career.

I studied at Howard. I studied at Oxford.

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

Physick, says Sydenham, is not to bee learned by going to Universities, but hee is for taking apprentices; and says one had as good send a man to Oxford to learn shoemaking as practising physick.

Oxford is the most dangerous place to which a young man can be sent.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.

Governance has been at the heart of the work of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations and is a clear focus in its report, ‘Now for the Long Term.’

I was in the debating society at school, I was the president of the Oxford Union, and then I became an MP in the Nineties.

I don’t think I’m going to become Brad Pitt overnight, but I presume if walk down Oxford Street, there is a chance someone might clock me.

In 1946, Oxford University in England was offered large funds to create a new Institute of Human Nutrition. The University refused the funds on the ground that the knowledge of human nutrition was essentially complete, and that the proposed institution would soon run out of meaningful research projects.

In many ways, I was a typical young guy out of college. I was at Oxford, where every night there’d be a late showing of some great film.

I got a PhD from Harvard and a few years later, there was a girl from Sunderland who hadn’t got into Oxford or Cambridge, even though she’d got perfect A-levels. Harvard asked me to come and recruit her because I was recruited out of university by Harvard – they were trying to show that people could make it.

My host at Richmond, yesterday morning, could not sufficiently express his surprise that I intended to venture to walk as far as Oxford, and still farther. He however was so kind as to send his son, a clever little boy, to show me the road leading to Windsor.

I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and also undertook vocal training since a young age. However, it was only during my time at the University of Oxford did the musician in me came alive.

Ah, isn’t that nice, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew.

Cory Booker I’ve known since 1993. We used to be part of the L’Chaim Society at Oxford University together.

He has a calsium deposit on the medulla oblongota of his brain, but he is a brilliant man. This man has a BA, an MA from Havard, and a PhD from Oxford. He’s a brilliant man I tell you, Mean Gene.

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I’m going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

At the Oxford Union I’d never debated before but I gave it a go.

When I finished my degree at Oxford, I went and acted for a bit. And I was appalling. And with each part, I thought, ‘Well, that’s embarrassing. I’d better do one more to show people I’m not that bad.’ And, in fact, instead of a taking a year, that’s gone on for 35 years.

I went to Oxford University – but I’ve never let that hold me back.

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.

Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving.

I’d always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I’d think: ‘Where is the justice?’ I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They’ll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don’t you worry.

My first paid job was delivering newspapers. The first paid acting job I got was dressing up as Edam cheese and handing out leaflets on London’s Oxford Street. I got pushed over by these little herberts and given a good shoe-in.

Nurses told my mother that I was going to be OK. They thought I could walk without a limp and without a brace. And we stopped in a shoe store on the way home and bought a pair of low-top saddle Oxford shoes, which was sort of a symbol that I was going to be a normal little boy.

To call a man a characteristically Oxford man is, in my opinion, to give him the highest compliment that could be paid to any human being.

Who is more in touch with the problems of this country? One of those guys who goes off to Oxford or to University of Yale, or someone who has lived in buses, in the Metro, in the street?

At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.

When I began to write, I was surprised at how little London had been used in crime fiction. Places such as Edinburgh or Oxford or L.A. seemed to have stronger identities.

When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.

I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work – or not.

From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor’s mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.

It is true that I should have been surprised in the past to learn that Professor Hardy had joined the Oxford Group. But one could not say the adverse chance was 1:10. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad, and then this particular event would be quite likely.

I wanted to be a war reporter – scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn’t want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

I am a Topshop homing pigeon! I can walk into the Oxford Circus branch and ferret out the best bits in minutes.

I was lucky to get to Oxford. I am now an honorary fellow of my old college, which is nice, particularly for a colonial like me.

One of my biggest Achilles’ heels has been my ego. And if I, Kanye West, the very person, can remove my ego, I think there’s hope for everyone.

I was away in France, as I was studying French and German, and a friend of mine bumped into a guy called Richard Curtis, who was producing the Oxford Revue that year. Two people had dropped out and he asked me to step in.

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.

And certainly having gone to Oxford, and seen some of the other students there, I wouldn’t say the ones at my school were less capable. They could’ve been there.

I drove to Oxford with my van full of petrol and tin cans, as I didn’t know there were service stations on the motorway. I pulled up on the hard shoulder and got my cans out. Then I filled up and set off again. That’s how naive I was – so much not a cosmopolitan girl.

None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.

I made it to Oxford, but it is not that I am particularly clever, much more that I am a worker bee.

It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of ‘Nietzsche and German Idealism.’

I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini-wax. See what Hollywood does to you?

I used to leave my house at 6:30 in the morning, and I would visit 10 shops every Saturday, starting at the furthest shop I’d decided to go to that day, ending up in Oxford Street 12 hours later.

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.’ ‘I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,’ said Paul.

People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the ‘Oxford bubble’ because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.

Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money…If Oxford undergraduates were paid for their work, I would have performed miracles of scholarship and become Regius Professor of Modern History.

I went from a very structured life in Oxford going to school every day to suddenly a week later I was living in Budapest for eight months. It’s a big change so I feel I’ve changed so much from that experience as a person.

Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a ‘war on terrorism’. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can’t wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you’ve won? When you’ve got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?

At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.

I arrived at Arsenal in 2010, and had five spells out on loan – plus another one with Oxford where I played just once.

My parents didn’t go to university and weren’t brought up in England. They hadn’t heard of any other universities other than ‘Cambridge’ or ‘Oxford.’

People say it takes a village to raise a child. People ask me how my daughter is doing. She’s only doing good if your daughter’s doing good. We’re all one family.

When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.

I first came across the Anders Army story by accident. When I first went to live in Oxford in the 1960s, I discovered that some of my close neighbours had been on the Anders trail.

I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I’m not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.

A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.

Conflicting views and contrasting ideas are the essence of all great debates throughout history, from the Greeks to the Oxford Union Debating Society. Today, we turn to television for the creative clash of ideas on matters that touch our lives.

When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months.

I was a graduate student at Oxford when I discovered Georgiana.

Because I’d done 30 plays or so at Oxford, I thought that I was an actress anyway because that’s what I was doing!

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

I applied to Oxford in the ’80s and was invited to an interview. It was like a scene from ‘Billy Elliot.’ People were making fun of me for my accent and the way I was dressed. It was the most embarrassing, awful experience I had ever had in my life.

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

My father was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s, where the conventions and etiquette of clothing were crucial to the pervasive class consciousness of the place and time.

I’m an Einstein of the streets and an Oxford scholar of common sense.

The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.

When I first decided to take off the tap shoes and concentrate on theatre directing, Dominic Dromgoole got in touch to ask if I’d like to do something with Oxford Stage Company. My reaction was negative.

There’s something awful about Oxford, I think. It’s such a little ghetto.

Boxers don’t tend to come from Cambridge or Oxford. Sometimes the things we say don’t come out well. We are not known for our vocabulary.

When I was 16, walking down Oxford Street, I saw Ian Brown. I said, ‘Are you Ian Brown?’ He said no and walked off, but I am sure it was him.

I did gigs alongside Oxford students and I thought being working class I’d feel inferior. But the thing is you don’t feel inferior if you’re getting more laughs than the other bloke on the bill.

The astrologers and historians write that the ascendant as of Oxford is Capricornus, whose lord is Saturn, a religious planet, and patron of religious men.

Time is the only luxury. It’s the only thing you can’t get back. If you lose your luggage – I’m not gonna say the obvious brand of luggage that I’d normally say because I’ve got a meeting with them soon – if you lose your expensive luggage at the airport, you can get that back. You can’t get the time back.

Oxford is a funny place, as it is a mixture of town and gown. You have the students at the main university and at Oxford Brookes, but there is also a big working-class community.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.

If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree.

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.

The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin’s word ‘refudiate’ to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to ‘dismangle’ the English language.

It would have been amazing to have been a student at Oxford during that golden moment in the 1910s, rubbing elbows with the likes of Aldous Huxley and T.E. Lawrence, before World War I shattered everything forever.

People who go to Oxford and Cambridge are often unproductive. What am I saying? This is nonsense. No, sometimes they get so competitive that, unless they’re going to be Pulitzer prize-winning, they can’t get off their backside.

I have worked out that I am living in London on ВЈ27 a day while David Cameron is claiming a damn sight more for his big house in Oxford.

Oxford shirts. Definitely more oxford shirts.

After qualifying for a B.Sc. in pharmacology, I spent a few months in Sheffield University as a research worker in the pharmacology department but then went back to Oxford to the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research in order to study for a D. Phil. with Dr. Geoffrey Dawes.

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

A dining club which I was involved in at Oxford University invited Sir Isaiah Berlin to dinner, who I believe was probably the greatest liberal philosopher in the 20th century. I sat beside him and we spoke about liberal philosophy and the events of the 20th century all night over dinner – it was unforgettable!

Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.

What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it.

“It is typical of Oxford,” I said, “to start the new year in autumn.”

We have the ability to approach our race like ants, or we have the ability to approach our race like crabs.

[To Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, on his return from self-imposed exile, occasioned by the embarrassing flatulence he had experienced in the presence of the Queen:] My Lord, I had forgot the fart.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all.

I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they’re actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.

I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father’s income was such that I wouldn’t have got a grant, and he wouldn’t let me go to university, and that was the end of it.

A lot of girls annoy me who go to university – one girl told me she was going to Oxford because it was something to do between leaving school and getting married. And I’ve got to pay for that being an income tax payer.

So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.

I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up and stuff, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all. So for me, it’s always comedy, and then acting is just one medium of comedy.

People used to ask me for advice, and I’d say, ‘Please, don’t ask me!’ Yes, I did economics at Oxford, but that’s not the same as having a broad knowledge of personal finance.

Karan Thapar is an endangered species. They don’t make them like him anymore. True, thousands have gone to the Doon Valley School after him, as indeed to Oxford and Cambridge universities. But Karan Thapar is more than the sum of his upbringing. He’s a gentleman journalist.

When I play discos in Belfast or freshers’ week in Oxford, there are 1,800 kids dressed as me. It’s odd, it’s funny, and it pays really well.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

Ralston stiffened at the reference to the stupid wager that caused so much pain and unhappiness. He ignored Oxford’s proffered hand, and instead met the baron’s concerned gaze, and said, “Keep the money. I have her. She’s all I want.

I met someone with a title on my first day, Baronet von Something, and I thought: ‘Look at me, I’ve really grafted. Who are these people who have just waltzed into Oxford? I don’t want to hang out with those people. They’re nothing like me.’

One thing that used to worry me is the fact that it seemed like Harvard was this big scary thing where I would have to spend all my time studying just to get in. But getting to go to both campuses of Harvard and Oxford and getting to meet some of the professors was absolutely amazing.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

When I was at Oxford, I was a Thatcher child; I was fascinated by politics and I spent three years being obnoxious in the Oxford Union.

Would physics at Geneva be as good as physics at Harvard? I think not. Rome? I think not. In Britain, I don’t think there is one place, neither Cambridge nor Oxford, which can compare with Harvard.

There was still food rationing in England and life was difficult all through my 2 year stay in Oxford.

If you Google me, you’ll find plenty of “dumb blonde” references – even though I graduated with honors from Stanford and studied at Oxford University. I don’t let it bother me.

Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.

I want to prove that you don’t have to come from Oxford University or Rada – and you don’t have to have parents that support you – to succeed.

Oxford is wonderful. I’m having a great time. We do go out, but I still try to spend most of my time studying in the library.

I had a great time at Oxford, got a wonderful, wonderful education there.

Youthquake’ wasn’t an entirely predictable choice for Oxford’s Word of 2017. It hasn’t been on the lips of an entire nation, nor is it new. But it amply fulfilled the criteria Oxford requires for selection.

In which year did a Harvard sculler last outrow an Oxford man at Henley?” Langdon had no idea, but he could imagine only one reason the question had been asked. “Surely such a travesty has never occurred.

I boxed in Golden Gloves at Oxford and still know how to throw a straight left jab.

Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.

I was born in Oxford. I grew up in Cascais, Portugal.

The drama school was in Oxford – and it’s funny to think of it, but in those days when I started out the University was nearly all male. And they certainly weren’t mixed.

I could go to Oxford, I could immerse myself in a new culture, I could develop my intellectual capital, I could expand my network, I can travel from country to country like it’s state to state, and being in that fraternity of Rhodes Scholars was just a truly special demarcation.

When I left Oxford, I knew I wanted to act, but I was unsure how to go about it.

While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.

I am honoured to be accepting this degree from Oxford University, a world famous educational institution. This is a very special day for my family and I, but also for my fans, who have shared this journey with me.

I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one’s life. One sees the shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon’s head, and one suffers, because it does not turn one to stone.

I was born in the UK and brought up by my single mother in Ghana, where being black was unexceptional. As an adult, I learnt to succeed in white Britain, going from a state sixth form, to Oxford university, to a well-paid job in the City, to becoming the first black Conservative MP to attend the cabinet.

Oxford also taught me something else – it taught me scepticism.

My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child’s attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.

We’ve been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone’s completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that’s too high. It’s not a very complicated idea.

This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.

I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn’t know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn’t do that in Pakistan – you’d be thrown in prison.

I was brought up on a farm in Oxford but my parents always had a flat in London, and we’d go to pretty smart restaurants, so it’s always seemed important to eat well.

I didn’t get on a plane until I was 23, after I left Oxford and was teaching at Lucy Clayton Secretarial College in London.

Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.

Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I’m not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.