Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan:
“Academia has nothing to do with producing knowledge. They produce PR. The four most important thinkers of modern history – Freud, Marx, Einstein, Darwin – none was a conventional academic.” (Source)
A.N. Wilson, English historian and columnist:
“In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity – or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity – by being opinionated rather than by being learned.”
This entry was posted on October 14, 2008 at 3:26 pm, and is filed under Quotes. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
I would question that Freud was one of the most important thinkers of modern history.
To Nassim’s comment, most of those predate our current structured era. Keynes and von Nuemmann, two other strong candidates for influential thinkers, were academics. You could also put Turing in there.