The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England.
- Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author
A - F
- 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.
- Karl Baedeker Baedeker's Great Britain (1887), "From London to Oxford"
- Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness that they are no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge.
- Living in Cambridge, with nature and everything, it's so clean.
- You will feel interested to know the fate of my mathematical speculations in Cambridge. One of the papers is already printed in the Mathematical Journal. Another, which I sent a short time ago, has been very favourably received, and will shortly be printed together with one I had previously sent.
- There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
- Alain de Botton, in Robert Chalmers Alain de Botton: 'My father was physically quite violent... he would destroy the house', The Independent, 25 March 2012
- The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
- Samuel Butler, in The Note-books of Samuel Butler: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition, ReadHowYouWant.com, 28 January 2008, p. 42
G - L
- At Cambridge, it was the weirdest culture. Everyone pretended they didn't do any work, yet it was so competitive.
- Naomie Harris, in Lisa Sewards Poppy the dazzler - The actress who conquered Hollywood but remains unknown here, Dailymail Online 28 March 2008
- I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.
- Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk, it has seen Porson sober. I am a greater scholar than Wordsworth and I am a greater poet than Porson. So I fall betwixt and between
- Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.
- I did have a certain frustration about how the world was. I still don't like authority exercised without reason. But they laugh at you at Cambridge if you say that sort of thing. For them, the law is a system of rules not that different from mathematics. It's not your business to say what's right and wrong - you just apply the rules on one side or the other. It doesn't matter which.
M - R
- Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities - in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.
- Nancy Pearcey, in America Will Never Be Free Until the Last Liberal Is Strangled in the Entrails of the Last Bureaucrat, The Pearcey Report, 12 November 2010
- The first thoughts, which gave rise to his Principia, Isaac Newton had, when he retired from Cambridge in 1666 on account of the plague. As he sat alone in a garden, he fell into a speculation on the power of gravity; that as this power is not found sensibly diminished at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth to which we can rise, neither at the tops of the loftiest buildings, nor even on the summits of the highest mountains, it appeared to him reasonable to conclude that this power must extend much further than was usually thought: why not as high as the moon? said he to himself.
- Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
- Looking through the list of earlier Nobel laureates, I note a large number with whom I became acquainted and with whom I interacted during those years as they passed through Cambridge.
- I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.
- Bertrand Russell , Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1893); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884–1914), edited by Nicholas Griffin.
- Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
S - Z
- No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge profound,
In learning and science so greatly abound;
Since some carry thither a little each day,
And we meet with so few who bring any away.
- Horace Smith, in The Tin Trumpet: Or, Heads and Tails, for the Wise and Waggish, Volume 2, Whittaker & Company, 1836, p. 130
- Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
- If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? -- not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?