The Best Professor T Quotes

Professor: [to his students] I have studied your papers with the closest attention and I have to say, not a single one shows the slightest sign of clarity, insight or intelligence.
[he throws all their essays in the bin]
Professor: Instead I propose to read an extract on the nature of a criminal by a former student, who happens to be in possession of a first-class mind.
Professor: [reading aloud Lisa Donckers' essay that she had written when she was his student] "Criminality and brutality are not an inevitable inheritance from our bestial forebears. Each of us is capable of cruelty, but many of us - most, indeed - do not succumb to that urge. Despite poverty or provocation, society is not lawless. Only the worst give in to base instincts, be it greed or covetousness or lust. The mind of the murderer is formed in increments. It takes shape when someone decides to walk that dark path, yet others with far greater reason turn away."

Professor: You don't believe in true love?
Christina: Sure I do. And I still put out a stocking for Santa.

Professor: Would you mind dropping me off? I, too, have a lunch date.
Lisa: Professor. Dark horse.
Professor: It's with my mother!

Professor: To me, being half right is like being half happy.

[Lisa Donckers speaks while she is eating a pot noodle]
Professor: Please don't speak with your mouth full, Sergeant, especially if your brain is empty.

Professor: I do not catch scumbags, I study them.

[Professor T walks into his office and finds Ingrid Snares chopping a pineapple into slices with a meat cleaver]
Professor: You attack with feeling, Miss Snares.
Ingrid: It helps if I imagine it is a certain someone's head.
[the Dean walks in]
The: Ah, Jasper. I wonder if I might have a quick word.
Professor: I wonder if *you* might.

[the police are investigating a fire which seems to have been started deliberately in a student house; could the fire have been started by one of the students who live there?]
DI: I don't imagine any of them would be stupid enough to set the place on fire whilst they themselves were still in it.
Professor: The term "homo sapiens" is a misnomer, Detective Sergeant. Human beings are guided far more often by perverse irrationality than by solid reasoning.

Professor: That night, the one we talked about. I'm wondering why your grandmother went to sleep so early.
Sophie: I put some drops in her port.
Professor: I thought so. Because she was going to pay for your assisted living?
Sophie: No, I didn't want to watch her boring soap operas.

[Professor: "Who would you save from a burning house: the cleaning lady, or the scientist who is about to invent a cure for cancer? The cleaning lady is your mother." Every student has failed on that question]
Professor: Who would *you* save?
The: Oh, my mother, of course.
Professor: Why "of course"?
The: Because anyone who leaves their mother to be burnt alive in a house fire doesn't *deserve* to be cured of cancer.
Professor: Now *that* is an excellent answer.

Ingrid: [making finger quotes around emphasised words] These two ladies are seeking an audience with "the professor"; the "famous one" who "solves everything".
Professor: Indeed!
Ingrid: I said you might see them instead.

Lisa: It's really quite a transformation Mr Banks. Choirboy at 12 and convict at 20.
Professor: From songbird to jailbird.

Professor: [Professor T to his students upon discovering that none of them reads the local paper...] You are a generation obsessed with the narcissistic posturing and mindless witterings of attention junkies from the far-flung reaches of the planet. Yet, with your snouts buried deep in the sulfurous trough of social media, you've failed to notice the multitudes that land daily on your own doorsteps.