Seth Godin:

It was a tremendous gift, this ability to choose.

The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.

Nature's editors, on BGI:

Are these budding scientists short-changing themselves by focusing so single-mindedly on one category of technical expertise in the shape of high-throughput genomic sequencing?

Would the slower, less tightly focused training provided by Western-style postgraduate study ultimately allow them to become more imaginative and creative in their research?

The answer is not clear-cut.

Nancy Andreasen:

If you're at the cutting edge, then you're going to bleed.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20's in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read -- and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Has American higher education become a dinosaur?

Mark C. Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Richard Sennett:

Doing a job properly takes the time it takes.

Alain de Botton:

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.