20th-century Academic Quotes

Gambling has held human beings in thrall for millennia. It has been engaged in everywhere, from the dregs of society to the most respectable circles.

Peter L. Bernstein

Our Earth survives recurring furies of her stomach pains and quakes From the bleeding anger of her wounds volcanic ash becomes the hope that gives rebirth to abundance of seedtimes.

Indeed, one of the most frightening consequences of the Holocaust may well be that rather than serving as a warning to preserve humanity at all cost, it has provided a license to privilege physical survival over moral existence.

Human beings are distinguished by a capacity for experience as well as by their behavior, and homosexuality is as much a matter ofemotion as of genital manipulation.... As we each examine our own sense of identity we realize how much more complex is the question of homosexuality than a mere Kinsey-like computation of orgasms.

Cyber war takes place largely in secret, unknown to the general public on both sides.

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

Marjorie Hope Nicolson

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.

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.

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

James Rhyne Killian

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

Sometimes the last thing learners need is for their preferred learning style to be affirmed. Agreeing to let people learn only in a way that feels comfortable and familiar can restrict seriously their chance for development.

Stephen Brookfield

A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.

A wise psychoanalyst once told me, Stop looking at what you're saying, look at what you're doing.

The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state.

Simply put, the Prague Spring can be considered the forerunner of Eurocommunism, and the Czechoslovak reformers can be considered its forefathers in their attempt to create a model of socialism that, rooted in the Western tradition, differs from that of the USSR.

Public deliberation is a means by which citizens make tough choices about basic purposes and directions for their communities and their country.

F. David Mathews

All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the boards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency.

You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept… You are not a concept, Africa. You are a glimpse of the infinite.

Perhaps the difference between a professor and a bus driver is that the professor can say stupid things with complete authority while the bus driver is not authorized to make brilliant insights.

When we try to describe one person to another …, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job—no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being.

Passion for equality blinds the utopian to the fact that society, as a whole, is based on inequality of men in two respects: the inventor, the innovator, the exceptional man creates something new and insures continuous progress; the others emulate his work or merely improve their own lot by benefiting from his creativity.

A totally honest organization would never hide or disguise actions or stonewall.

Brian Martin (social scientist)

Remember that the future is not somewhere we are going, it is something we are creating. Everyday we do things that make some futures more probable and others less likely.

There is no more fulfilling experience in all the world than the sense that God's Spirit has taken you and dared to use you for His glory.

Dennis F. Kinlaw

One of the fundamental conditions of happiness is to know that everything that one does has a meaning in eternity

Titus Burckhardt