Alfred Hitchcock
was known for his wise and pithy words of advice about film-making. If one does
some minor editing and reads between the lines of the following Hitchcock
quotes that I found on the BraineyQuote.com website, one gets a picture of the educational philosophy of many instructors and institutions of higher learning. For the first several, I have included my edits [in brackets]. I have left a number of
unedited quotes, and invite you to do your own editing.
- Always make the audience [students] suffer as much as possible.
- I never said all actors [students] are cattle; what I said was all actors[students] should be treated like cattle.
- I aim to provide the public [students] with beneficial shock.
- The length of a film [lecture] should be directly [indirectly] related to the endurance of the human bladder.
- The paperback [Kindle] is very interesting, but I find it will never replace the hardcover book. It makes a very poor doorstop.
- When an actor [student] comes to me and wants to discuss his character [assignment; grade]. I say, ‘It’s in the script [syllabus].’ If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?’ I say ‘Your salary [ learning; grade].
- Television [education] has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
- Television is like the American toaster. You push the button and the same thing pops up every time.
- Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
- We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.
- Self-plagiarism is style.
- A good dinner is when the price of the dinner, theatre admission, and the
babysitter was worth it. - Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.
- There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.
- Revenge is sweet and not fattening.
And another thing Hitchcock said: “Treat actors like cattle and you get a stampede of the bloody things through the sound stage!” (But don’t go to “BraineyQuote” to quote me on it.)
Drew, Thank you for this wonderful Hitchcockism. Higher education is treating students and faculty members like cattle and they are stampeding. The two biggest dangers to an individual standing in front of a stampede are: 1) Trying to stop it from the front–You’ll get run over and most likely trampled. 2) Not moving to the side, but trying to dodge the animals as they run past you. Most likely one of them will hit you, know you down and you will get trampled by the ones following.