I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn't know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn't do that in Pakistan - you'd be thrown in prison.
I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.
Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.
In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors.
I couldn't help but to think back to my classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio. They had the same talent, the same brains, the same dreams as the folks we sat with at Stanford and Harvard. I realized the difference wasn't one of intelligence or drive. The difference was opportunity.
Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.
I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn't believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.
I don't believe I'll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn't go to Harvard.
All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
Blueprints are for Harvard MBAs. I dropped out of college.
You know, I'm from the Midwest, man - that shapes my personality much more than having gone to Harvard.
There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
While living in America when I attended Harvard in the early 1970s, I saw for myself the awesome, almost miraculous, power of a people to change policy through democratic means.
If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause.
I never felt that I had the natural intellectual gifts that the people who graduate first in their class from Harvard Law had.
If you think about the amount of critical thinking that has come into the field of economics, two universities have dominated the landscape in my life: Chicago and Harvard.
In not having an appointment at Harvard, I'm in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color.
I went to an all-girls pre school where everyone went off to Harvard or Yale, and I had zero interest in doing so. I think they thought I was on drugs. There was a neighboring all-boys school, so we'd get together and do dumb things. It was your typical Catholic-American upbringing.
When Princeton plays Harvard, I'm rooting for Princeton, of course. Go Tigers!
But after the time there I'd had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn't last very long.
The actions of the University in my case make it abundantly clear that the Administration's rhetoric about Harvard's desire to attract and retain the most distinguished women in the world is empty.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.
I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
I went off to Harvard Law School for six weeks, and then I said, 'Doggone this, it's not what I want to do.' I remember when I told my dad I was leaving law school, and I wanted to go into football. He said, 'Be a good coach.'
It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.
Governor Romney has a great business background. He is extremely well educated. He has several degrees from Harvard, including, you know, business and including a law degree.
I'm not impressed by people's degrees. Harvard doesn't impress me, Yale doesn't impress me, Columbia doesn't impress me.
I was living as a young single mom. I was 19 when I was divorced, and my daughter was a year old, and I waited tables here three to four nights a week for several years while I was trying to support myself and my daughter and the day I got that acceptance at Harvard Law School was an unforgettable day.
I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.
I don't think I was funny until college. I lived with some Harvard MD/PhD students - they were so smart, and what I contributed to the house was, I was the funny one.
Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.
I majored in extracurriculars, honestly. I joined the Harvard Stand Up Comedy Society, which is a ragtag band of misfits. I wrote for 'On Harvard Time,' which was a student TV show trying to be 'The Daily Show.' And I wrote a humor column for 'The Crimson' starting my sophomore year.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR committed a most visionary act: He appointed a Harvard historian to write the official account of the U.S. Navy in World War II. Samuel Eliot Morison was given the rank of lieutenant commander, with the right to interview anyone of whatever status.
