Laura Penny

Laura Penny (born 1975) was born in Nova Scotia and currently teaches English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York. Ms. Penny has worked as a bookstore clerk, a student activist, a union organizer, and a university instructor.

• "You think you're so smart" is never a compliment; the only thing worse than being smart is thinking that you are.
  • Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 4

• Nerds do not think they are better than you. Nerds are better than you, in their particular fields, unless you happen to be an even more devoted nerd.
  • Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 12

• Anyone taking classics or history for the prestige is either at Oxford or stuck in 1909.
  • Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 13

• Why clog your head with tedious facts about the past when you can simply demand an exam review sheet or consult Google or Wikipedia?
  • Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 23

• When we valorize ignorance and debase reason, we diminish man and the humanity that dwells within him, to bum an old fashioned phrase from Kant.
  • Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 35

• We are not the adults in the sense that Kant intended, but adolescents. This is a problem, because we are the world's most heavily armed teenagers.
  • Chapter Two, At the Arse End of the Late Great Enlightenment, p. 58

• All we really need to do is learn 'em so they don't frig up the cash register or offend the customers.
  • Chapter Three, Is our Schools Sucking?, p. 90

• Who teh heLL R u 2 tELL me what 2 reed or how 2 spel?
  • Chapter Four, Screw U or Hate My Professors, p. 120 (spelling as per text...)

• If there is no more market for ancient Greek, there should be no more ancient Greek. If there are no jobs for historians, there should be no history. If there is no money in brains, there should be no brains - except for the brains that make money.
  • Chapter Four, Screw U or Hate My Professors, p. 131

• The panic over public health care is funny and sad, since America has had death panels and sinister bureaucrats for years. They're called Aetna, Humana, and Wellpoint, they make a killing, figuratively and literally.
  • Chapter Five, Bully vs. Nerd, p. 139

• Bankers grovelled before the governments they usually revile, like wispy poets whining for grant money. They got billions in bailouts, yet somehow the financial sector still inspires more trust and respect than the government that saved it from itself.
  • Chapter Five, Bully vs. Nerd, p. 168

• It's a shame that pantyless party girls get more attention than the real heroes, the nurses and teachers and moms.
  • Chapter six, More is Less, p. 183

• Laughing at the clueless mouthfarts of cute twenty somethings who spent their high-school years with vocal coaches or plastic surgeons is another variation on the theme "Are we getting dumber?"
  • Chapter six, More is Less, p. 184

• Posthumous fame, book fame, nerd fame is not like the good kind of fame. It might last for centuries and let antique egg heads torture the young from the grave, but it just doesn't pay the bills.
  • Chapter Seven, If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?, p. 206 (See also: Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, James Joyce, Herman Mellville...)

• I can sculpt a birthday cake out of shit and insist that I obviously mean cake, that my real intent is to wish you a happy birthday, but my intentions and protestations cannot turn crap into a delicious dessert.
  • Chapter Seven, If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?, p. 212

• The humanities are despised because they are dangerous. They arm us with the intellectual weapons we need to fight the forces of ignorance and idiocracy, and to free ourselves from freedumb.
  • Chapter Seven, If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?, p. 235 (See also: Chris Hedges)

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Laura Penny