Occasionally, Columbia professors break the monotony of Honesty Policy regurgitation to add a little spice to the first lecture of the semester.  Here are this term’s quips:



Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Intermediate Macroeconomics

“Empirical evidence suggests that people die.”

“There is one big difference between Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, and that is that Macroeconomics is useful.”

“Let me start out with the most important lesson of the year – how to pronounce my name. It’s Xavier. Pronounced shah-bee-ay. I know some of you are Americans and will be tempted to pronounce it zay-vee-air. That would be a mistake.”

Jonathan Gross, Discrete Mathematics

“When you don’t know what I’m doing [in lecture] you can be pretty sure it’s self-parody.  I’m not quite sure when this happened but it was so long ago that I can’t turn it off.”

Patricia Lindemann, Science of Psychology

“No question is too stupid, especially if you ask it out of class.”

Marco Castaldi, Thermodynamics

“This is what separates engineers from the rest of the poor souls who are not engineers”  (Bwog can only imagine what “this” is).



Dusa McDuff, Introduction to Higher Math

“All mathematics is imaginary.”

James Applegate, Earth, Moon, and Planets

“[The textbook is] no French beach sex novel, but it’s a good read.”