20th-century Academic Quotes

Lawrence Lessig

Harold Laski

Samantha Power

Terry Eagleton

Donald Norman

Lionel Trilling

Fredric Jameson

I am interested in how we interrogate architecture in terms of its social functions and meanings. Architectural historians writing on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain have tended to see social history as the answer to this question. But the social history of architecture or the histories of specific social groups which operated in and around the architecture or building(s), or indeed the spaces created by them or for them, provide only a backdrop or loose historical context.

For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a gross immorality in itself, for morality lives and dies with the human endeavour to establish its victory upon earth.

When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

Benjamin Barber

So long as we judge ourselves by human comparisons, there is plenty of room for self-satisfaction, and self-satisfaction kills faith, for faith is born of the sense of need. But when we compare ourselves with Jesus Christ, and through Him, with God, we are humbled to the dust, and then faith is born, for there is nothing left to do but to trust to the mercy of God.

William Barclay

Flaubert poses as the outsider with insider information who excoriates a reality as degraded and mendacious. It is as if the literary standing of the author in the world of imagination and fiction paradoxically grants him a greater access to the truth than would be available in the falseness of empirical existence.

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Susan Blackmore

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

Malcolm Bradbury

The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.

Stephen L. Carter

Arrogance rides triumphantly through the gates, barely glancing at the old woman about to cut the rope and spring shut the trap.

The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.
NOBODY CARES

The armature of economic neo-liberalism... cannot concede any space to the idea of counter-conduct; counter-conduct becomes inconceivable, since conduct as such is a concept fully integrated into a scientific-epistemological field. Regime of veridiction, homo oeconomicus, rational behavior, ethical and political neutralization – such is the scheme, for instance, of American neo-liberalism. In this setting, counter-conduct is nothing more than a form of irrationality, just as in the history of psychiatry, it is but a form of abnormality.

Arnold Davidson

Everyone was muttering about Bill Clinton's philanderings before he came to visit, but once he walked into the room none of the women - or men - could get enough of him. He rather ignored me: my hair wasn't big enough.

If I want to be truly happy, I have to be a part of state action - a civil servant.

Wolfgang Drechsler

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

Whether or not our position fairly can be charged as apolitical depends entirely upon how one defines political. If political be taken in the narrow sense, as signifying those means and methods the world regularly accepts as normative for its doing of politics, then the position of me and mine clearly and is that of apoliticism. If, however, political be understood in the broad, etymological sense, as identifying whatever actions have public effect upon the life of the city (polis), then there are no grounds for accusing either me or any of mine of advocating apoliticism.

Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to correct it is another.

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

We must consider not only why the classical theory of democracy appears to be in contradiction with the observed practice, but also why the many different responses to this observation, though mutually incompatible, all share the belief that democracy is the best form of political organization.

Moses I. Finley

Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?

Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company (with a sideline business in national defense and homeland security), which does its accounting on a cash basis, only counting premiums and payouts as they go in and out the door. An insurance company with cash accounting... is an accident waiting to happen.

Peter R. Fisher

Human sexuality is... a long way from the depositing of seminal fluid, like squirting jam in a donut.

Any high school boy or girl knows how to calculate the force with which a stone he or she throws will hit someone in the face, but nothing in those equations they use will tell them whether or not to throw it…To solve the problem of values we must know what is valuable. Consciousness is the most valuable commodity…To bring values into science, we need to connect science with what is valuable—consciousness.

The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.