20th-century Academic Quotes

Held in the palms of thousands of disgruntled people over the centuries have been ideas worth millions - if they only had taken the first step and then followed through.

Robert M. Hayes
Robert M. Hayes
When I was against McCarthy and I was out in Wisconsin fighting against his election, and when I was calling in the police at Harvard, I was fighting for the same principles.

The human being is not a fallen being in need of redemption but rather a forgetful being who must be reminded of God and his own nature.

Joseph E. B. Lumbard
Joseph E. B. Lumbard
What Confucius tells us to focus on first is not how to bring stability to the world, but how to be the best possible version of ourselves. To "cultivate one's moral character" is the first step towards taking responsibility for the nation, and for society. Confucius and his disciples struggled hard to be "the best version" of themselves, but their aim in this was to better carry out their responsibilities to the society in which they lived.

You will remember some of what you hear; much of what you read; more of what you see, and almost all of what you experience and understand fully.

Your task as a leader is to help others to succeed, not to strive only for your own success. If I don't trust your motives, nothing else will matter -because my primary concern is your integrity.

Someday our grandchildren will very likely look back at the individual, selfish control of the wealth of the world by a small elite the same way we view slavery today.

Decision makers operating under excessive scrutiny tend to make the choices that are the easiest to justify rather than those they think are the best.

Political science is the study of the authoritative allocation of values for a society.

David Easton
David Easton
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.

Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.

The perception that cannabis is a safe drug is a mistaken reaction to a past history of exaggeration of its health risks.

That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

It is in the fusion of autochthonous Jews with semi-Jewish Khazars and Kabars in the tenth century that we must seek the earliest demographic basis of the Jewish population of medieval Hungary.

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they're defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles.... When prodded, they'll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations.

It's hard to know how to deal with liberalization in cultures that have been repressed for a long time, that don't have strong civil societies. But for the United States, of all countries, to be talking about human rights just rings very, very hollow in light of all the objections to our policy in Israel — the perception that we're hard on one side and not on the other, and that we don't contest the settlements or human-rights abuses committed by Israeli soldiers, and so on. Plus the fact that we have turned our back on international treaties and not been a global citizen, I think, makes people, even democrats, the leading lights in these repressed societies, very squeamish about being associated with the United States.

Samantha Power
Samantha Power
What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying?

The central activity of engineering, as distinguished from science, is the design of new devices, processes and systems.

The true leader serves. Serves people. Serves their best interests, and in doing so will not always be popular, may not always impress. But because true leaders are motivated by loving concern than a desire for personal glory, they are willing to pay the price.

The plants we've chosen will collect and cycle Earth's minerals, water, and air; shade the soil and renew it with leafy mulch; and yield fruits and greens for people and wildlife.

By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love.

You can be neither an effective scientist, engineer, executive, economist, nor architect without acquiring understanding of our society and of human relationships.

If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.

Which is easier to believe in, probability or God?...The ultimate fraud is the scientific atheist who believes in probability.

We see in Nature what we have been taught to look for, we feel what we have been prepared to feel.