"I started off with four daily classes of forty freshmen each and an advanced class of two students, which soon dwindled to one ... I was so unsophisticated that I could think of no finer job than to teach mathematics to freshmen. Until quite recently I thought that everybody was of the same opinion. It was a shock to me to learn that some think that there is a higher job.

"But actually I did not teach freshmen. I taught attorneys, bankers, big business men, physicians, surgeons, judges, congressmen, governors, writers, editors, poets, inventors, great engineers, corporation presidents, railroad presidents, scientists, professors, deans, regents, and university presidents. For that is what those freshmen are now, and of course they were the same persons then."

From Charles S. Slichter, Science in a Tavern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938 and 1966, pages 177-178