44 Ivory Tower Quotes

Following is our list of the most famous ivory tower quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational ivory tower quotes. Hopefully, these ivory tower quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your ivory tower knowledge!

More Ivory Tower Quotes

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

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory. — Benoit Mandelbrot

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

An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open. — Walter Darby Bannard

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. — Graham Hancock

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. — Sean O'Casey

I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence. — Michael Eric Dyson

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. — Colin Powell

It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money. — Alberto Manguel

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. — John Zorn

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. — Luigi Pirandello

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? — Wayne White

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

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty. — Anais Nin

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. — William E. Simon

Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought. — Francois Gautier

Even ivory towers need central heating. — Breyten Breytenbach

I hope I'm not giving the impression of an ivory tower science, but for me science is an attempt to understand, it's an attempt to understand the universe. — George Coyne

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

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation. — Steven Johnson

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. — Chuck Jones

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience. — W. H. Auden

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. — Jodi Picoult

Scientists are supposed to live in ivory towers. Their darkrooms and their vibration-proof benches are supposed to isolate their activities from the disturbances of common life. What they tell us is supposed to be for the ages, not for the next election. But the reality may be otherwise. — Simon LeVay

Strategy should evolve out of the mud of the marketplace, not in the antiseptic environment of an ivory tower. — Al Ries

Vigny, more secretAs if in his tower of ivory, retired before noon.N.B.: Vigny refers to Comte de Vigny, who locked himself in an ivory tower to work without the influences of man and desire. — Charles Augustin SainteBeuve

I know everybody. I make friends easily. I'm a gregarious guy, I'm open, I'm easy to get to know - I don't lock myself in an ivory tower. So I like people; I enjoy people. — Jerry Weintraub

Scholarship aimed at truly understanding what the biblical writers meant often does not filter down into the church and through the pulpit to folks who show up on Sunday. I think that's just wrong, but scholars rarely make any effort to decipher their own scholarly work for people outside the ivory tower. — Michael S. Heiser

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. — Neil deGrasse Tyson

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. — Noam Chomsky

Chefs who cook in these ivory towers are in control in their own world. We try to approximate that world as best we can, but ultimately our goal is to please our clients. — David Castle

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. — James Trefil

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. — Eric Burns

As for mathematicians themselves: don't expect too much help. Most of them are too far removed in their ivory towers to take up such challenges. And anyway, they are not competent. After all, they are just mathematicians-what we need is paramathematicians, like you... It is you who can be the welding force, between mathematicians and stories, in order to achieve the synthesis. — Apostolos Doxiadis

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other. — Dorothy Parker

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

Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art. — E. L. James

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures. — Terry Eagleton

That's a big part of being a designer now: going out, having dinners, meeting people. Being in an ivory tower, you can feel very removed. — Joseph Altuzarra

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

I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms. — Peter Greenaway

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. — W. Eugene Smith

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

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

In Conclusion

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