Are we a nation that educates the world's best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

Barack Obama

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

A. N. Wilson

This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.

Abhijit Banerjee

In the 1970s, what I, as a young foreign student studying in the United States, found most dynamic, exciting and impressive about this country is what much of the world continues to value most about the U.S. today: its open intellectual culture, its great universities, its capacity for discovery and innovation.

Ahmed Zewail

Including my nine years as a student, the majority of my life has been at Hokkaido University. After my retirement from the university in 1994, I served at two private universities in Okayama Prefecture - Okayama University of Science and Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts - before retiring from university work in 2002.

Akira Suzuki

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

Alain de Botton

Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.

Alan Dershowitz

When I'm introduced at invited lectures at other universities, the students place a Bobo doll by the lectern. From time to time, I have been asked to autograph one. The Bobo doll has achieved stardom in psychological circles.

Albert Bandura

I'm focused on the next generation, because I think it's very hard to break the habit of adults who've got salt and sugar addictions and just ways of being in this world. It's very hard even for the most enlightened people at famous universities that are very wealthy to spend the money that it takes to feed the students something delicious.

Alice Waters

I think universities are trying to figure out how we could use what we know about learning to change our education system, but it is sort of funny that they don't necessarily seem to be consulting the people who are sitting right there on campus.

Alison Gopnik

Social networks matter greatly, and our class calibrations are often around what college one attended, leading to gruesome institutional divisions between those who attend, say, community colleges and those who attend top-tier universities.

Alissa Quart

Now that we've discovered how to actually develop policies and projects holistically, if we can get the barriers out of the way and release the creativity that's in our universities, our farming organizations, amongst our farmers and land managers, we'll be astounded. As I'd like to express it, the human spirit will fly.

Allan Savory

My father is a poet. He's a literary giant of this country - writes in Hindi - and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.

Amitabh Bachchan

Universities want to recruit the students that they believe will best represent the university while in school and beyond. Students with a robust social media presence and clearly defined personal brand stand to become only more influential.

Amy Jo Martin

A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities.

Anant Agarwal

EdX will be a creating a platform which will be open source, not for profit, and a portal for a website where universities will offer their courses. For example, MIT courses will be offered as MITx and Harvard courses as HarvardX.

Anant Agarwal

I'd like to see the University of Western Australia and the other four or five universities in Western Australia really excel through having some of the greatest minds in the world attracted to it.

Andrew Forrest

I go to universities to talk to the students and teach them how to watch movies. Movies have so many elements - acting, music, art direction, costumes. I also tell them not to watch pirated movies. At the cinema, they can enjoy the big screen and the surround sound.

Andrew Lau

The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through - like I did - because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.

Andrew Neil

I will withhold federal funding from universities that shut down debate and can't stand different points of view.

Andrew Scheer