Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/1
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The King, observing with judicious eyes
The state of both his universities,
To Oxford sent a troop of horse, and why?
That learned body wanted loyalty;
To Cambridge books, as very well discerning
How much that loyal body wanted learning.
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— Joseph Trapp, lines written on George I's donation of the Bishop of Ely's Library to the University of Cambridge |
Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/4
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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.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/5
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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.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/7
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Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/10
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Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/23
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Captain Blackadder [who is proving that Nurse Mary is a German spy]: And then the final irrefutable proof. Remember you mentioned a clever boyfriend?
Nurse Mary: Yes?
Blackadder: Well, I leapt on the opportunity to test you. I asked you whether he had been to one of the great universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Hull.
Mary: Well?
Blackadder: What you didn't spot is that only two of those are great universities.
Mary: You swine!
General Melchett: That's right. Oxford's a complete dump!
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/25
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The Griffine, Bustard, Turkey & Capon
Lett other hungry Mortalls gape on
And on theire bones with Stomacks fall hard,
But lett All Souls' Men have ye Mallard.
CHORUS:
Hough the bloud of King Edward,
By ye bloud of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard!
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/27
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It is not accurate to call this [the Bollinger Club dinner] an annual event, because quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting. There is tradition behind the Bollinger; it numbers reigning kings among its past members. At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles. What an evening that had been! This was the first meeting since then, and from all over Europe old members had rallied for the occasion. For two days they had been pouring into Oxford: epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title was there for the beano.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/28
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So have I stood at eve on Isis' banks
To hear the merry Christ-church bells ring round.
So have I sat too in thy honoured shades
Distinguish'd Magdalen, on Cherwell's brink,
To hear thy silver Wolsey tones so sweet.
And so too have I paus'd and held my oar
And suffer'd the slow stream to bear me home,
No speed required while Wykeham's peal was up.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/29
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A Fellowship at All Souls is now one of the greatest honours the University can bestow, it is the equivalent (and in the opinion of the Fellows, more than the equivalent) of being a Fellow of Kings at Cambridge, it entitles the recipient to the centre page should he send a letter to The Times – The Times is sometimes called the All Souls Parish Magazine – it absolves him from unnecessary truck with undergraduates: safe in the knowledge that he is surrounded by nothing but first-class brains, the All Souls Fellow may devote himself with passion to that research to which the University has called him.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/30
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It could not be real, he thought. It was a fragile city spun out of dreams, so small that he could have held it on the palm of his hand and blown it away into silver mist. It was not real. He had dreamed of it for so long that now, when he looked down into the valley, the mist formed itself into and towards spires that would vanish under the sun the moment he shut his eyes... He shut his eyes, opened them, and the towers were still there.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/31
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If the Victorians can be said to have rampaged, they did so to greatest effect in the few acres of Oxford beside and immediately south of the University parks... There is Keble College, red brick sprawling so copiously that one feels the stuff must have got out of control, unleashing some dark force upon a helpless architect. Or the houses that survive as tenacious Gothic islands amid the concrete cliffs of the new University Departments.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/32
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Oxford is not intellectually stimulating – but that would be a good deal to ask of a university atmosphere... It is a dreadful climate, I know, but one seems able to eat and sleep very well, and keep very healthy.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/34
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After the first Degree-giving in the Sheldonian Theatre, when honorary M.A. degrees were granted to the five Principals of the women's foundations, Oxford became suddenly filled with unfamiliar feminine figures cycling up and down the High Street in scholars' and commoners' gowns.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/35
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Nowhere else, nowhere but in Oxford, do [books] seem to be so thoroughly natives of the place, so natural and withal so entrancing; from the moment when one first visits Blackwell, which is the initiation of the neophyte, to that when first the book-boy at the Bodleian staggers to one's desk with his piled folios.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/36
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In the autumn of 1943, Oxford slept in a strange and timeless silence. No bells rang in wartime, from clock tower or steeple, and there was almost no traffic; the uncluttered curve of the High, the spires of the colleges, slept in the clean, mist, quiet air as in some old don's dream of peace.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/37
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I did not go back to Oxford after the war. It was not just that I was still a cripple. There were plenty of cripples. But I could not face it. To me it was a city of ghosts. Of our eight scholars and exhibitioners who came up in 1912, Humphrey Sumner and I alone were alive. It was too much.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/39
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I cannot let the bonnets in, on any conditions this term. The three public lectures will chiefly be on angles, degrees of colour-prisms (without any prunes) and other such things, of no use to the female mind and they would occupy the seats in mere disappointed puzzlement.
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— John Ruskin, Professor of Art, refusing to admit women to his lectures in 1871 |
Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/47
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Neither rope-dancers nor players (who go on the stage for gain's sake), nor sword-matches, or sword players are to be permitted within the University of Oxford. All stage-players, rope-dancers and fencers transgressing are to be incarcerated.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/48
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Well, take a man connected with the legislative class, directly by birth and indirectly by opportunities, give him at least enough taste not to be ashamed of poetry, give him also enough energy not to be ashamed of football, and add a profound satisfaction with Oxford in general and Balliol in particular, and there you are.
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— Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street (1914) – the speaker is describing the "essential Balliol" |
Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/49
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Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town,
—Beauty she was statue cold—there's blood upon her gown:
Noon of my dreams, O noon!
Proud and godly kings had built her, long ago,
With her towers and tombs and statues all arow,
With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there,
And the streets where the great men go.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/51
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Whilom ther was dwellynge at Oxenford
A riche gnof, that gestes heeld to bord,
And of his craft he was a carpenter.
With hym ther was dwellynge a poure scoler,
Hadde lerned art, but al his fantasye
Was turned for to lerne astrologye...
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/52
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Ladies and gentlemen, here is the result of event number nine, the one mile: first, no. 41, R.G. Bannister, of the Amateur Athletics Association and formerly of Exeter and Merton Colleges, with a time which is a new meeting and track record, and which subject to ratification will be a new English Native, British (National), British (All-Comers), European, British Empire and World Record. The time is three...
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/54
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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 – the colleges I mean – like an opera.
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— W. B. Yeats, aged 23, in a letter to Katharine Tynan (1888) |
Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/56
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It is scandalous that someone from North Tyneside, Laura Spence, with the best qualifications and who wants to be a doctor, should be turned down by Oxford University using an interview system more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than justice. It is about time for an end to that old Britain where what matters more are the privileges you are born with, rather than the potential you actually have.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/60
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The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity.
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Portal:University of Oxford/Selected quotation/61
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This is a film where everyone talks about Oxford all the time. Oxford this, Oxford that. It makes me want to vomit. I can't work out what is this film's worse fate: dying in the trenches or not being able to go to Oxford.
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