Top 40 Louis Menand Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.”

— Louis Menand

2. “If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky.”

— Louis Menand

3. “They all believed that ideas are not “out there” waiting to be discovered, but are tools – like forks and knives and microchips – that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.”

— Louis Menand

4. “You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that’s how good ideas arise.”

— Louis Menand

5. “Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.”

— Louis Menand

6. “I think in general there’s no point in going into a field like English literature if you’re not going to have fun with it.”

— Louis Menand

7. “Basically what you want in any profession – I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor – is you want bright undergraduates to look at your profession as something they would be interested in getting into.”

— Louis Menand

8. “I don’t think the same curriculum fits every student body.”

— Louis Menand

9. “I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.”

— Louis Menand

10. “My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.”

— Louis Menand

11. “I don’t think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.”

— Louis Menand

12. “The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren’t trained to think in terms of general education. They’re trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.”

— Louis Menand

13. “Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it’s the faculty’s job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.”

— Louis Menand

14. “We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people’s cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.”

— Louis Menand

15. “A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.”

— Louis Menand

16. “Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.”

— Louis Menand

17. “Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.”

— Louis Menand

18. “The time between Bachelor’s degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you’re still only on a tenure ladder, you’re not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that’s a very long period of what’s essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.”

— Louis Menand

19. “I don’t really usually push an agenda, and I don’t feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.”

— Louis Menand

20. “You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you’re not going, they’re not going to be very effective.”

— Louis Menand

21. “Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression.”

— Louis Menand

22. “The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals – molecules or humans – might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate their behavior conformed to stable laws.”

— Louis Menand

23. “One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally – and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature – but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.”

— Louis Menand

24. “I do worry a lot about the time it takes for people to get a PhD, about the difficulty of finding employment, about the difficulty of getting tenure, and generally about the perception that undergraduates have, that this is a very high-risk career to get started.”

— Louis Menand

25. “I don’t think people believe that any more, I don’t think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.”

— Louis Menand

26. “James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches. On the contrary: it obligates us to regard those conclusions as provisional and partial, since it was for provisional and partial reasons that we undertook to find them.”

— Louis Menand

27. “Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.”

— Louis Menand

28. “I think that the idea that there’s such a thing as a national literature that’s somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.”

— Louis Menand

29. “Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.”

— Louis Menand

30. “If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.”

— Louis Menand

31. “One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you’re good at.”

— Louis Menand

32. “No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.”

— Louis Menand

33. “It’s generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest that professors are going to be more liberal than the general public.”

— Louis Menand

34. “Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.”

— Louis Menand

35. “We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.”

— Louis Menand

36. “For the kind of places I’ve written for and the kind of writing that I’ve done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who’s like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.”

— Louis Menand

37. “There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.”

— Louis Menand

38. “One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.”

— Louis Menand

39. “If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.”

— Louis Menand

40. “Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.”

— Louis Menand

41. “I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that’s part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there’s somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.”

— Louis Menand

42. “Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.”

— Louis Menand

43. “Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.”

— Louis Menand

44. “I don’t think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.”

— Louis Menand

45. “Darwin’s ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin’s theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz’s closes them.”

— Louis Menand

46. “In “The Free World,” Louis Menand paraphrased Hannah Arendt to describe the early 20th-century proponents of totalitarianism as “the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were the embodiments of the politics of resentment.”

— Louis Menand

47. “It was one of those moments when the universe is poised to plunge down a different path.”

— Louis Menand