Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are theguiltyauthors of Fenianism, tofound at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of peace to Ireland.

-Arnold, Matthew
  'On the Study of Celtic Literature'.

Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.

-Baedeker, Karl
  Great Britain, Route 30:'From London to Oxford'.

[At school] I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

-Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max(imilian)
  More,'Going Back To School'.

The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse, ForTories own no argument but force; With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs admit no force but argument.

-Browne,William
Literary  Anecdotes.

So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.

-Dryden,John
  'Prologue to the University of Oxon†at the  Acting of  The Silent Woman'.

The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of theThames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctityand truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

-Gibbon, Edward
^88  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch.52.

To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.

-Gibbon, Edward
Memoirs of My Life (published1796), ch.3.

The clever men at Oxford Know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much As intelligent MrToad.

-Grahame, Kenneth
  The Wind in the Willows, ch.10.

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

-Halifax, Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of
  Speech,York, 4 Nov.

You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.

-Hazlitt,William
Table Talk, vol.1,'The Ignorance of the Learned'.

I can't tell who's leadingöit's either Oxford or Cambridge.

-Snagge,John
  Radio commentary on the Boat Race, when the engine of Snagge's launch broke down. Quoted in C Dodd Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (1983), ch.14.