Academic Quotes

Thorstein Veblen
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
Lawrence Lessig
Harold Laski
Samantha Power
Edvard Westermarck
Increase Mather

Advertising as the printed form of selling would seem... ultimately to be justified in so far as it serves as a means of increasing legitimate human wants, as an agency of fair and economic competition in the distribution of goods, and as a stimulant to social progress.

Because Impudence is a Vice, it does not follow that Modesty is a Virtue; it is built upon Shame, a Passion in our Nature, and may be either Good or Bad according to the Actions perform'd from that Motive.

Nothing is more certain than that worlds on worlds, and spheres on spheres, stretch behind and beyond the actually seen.

Edward Carpenter
Edward Carpenter
If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this," Mrs. Wohlstetter wrote in her book: "We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide certainty.

To the generous mind
The heaviest debt is that of gratitude,
When 'tis not in our power to repay it.

Young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviors that can only be termed as trivial.

The severe restrictions which Wundt placed on introspection also manifest themselves in the types of judgment that his experimental subjects were required to make. In accordance with the precept that internal perception can only become observation insofar as it is linked to controllable external stimuli, the introspective reports from his laboratory are very largely limited to judgments of size, intensity, and duration of physical stimuli, supplemented at times by judgments of their simultaneity and succession.

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

The hero [of a narrative] must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female.... The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter.

In undertaking the conquest of self it is of the utmost importance to form strong bonds of habit between ideas and conduct.

Jules Payot
Jules Payot
Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.

When dealing with ancient sources, we cannot be content to know the religious and social settings out of which these sources have come. We should also know something about how the ancients viewed the writing of history and biography, for in the Gospels and Acts apparently we are dealing with three ancient biographies and one two-volume historical monograph (Luke-Acts).

Homophobia entails not only the fear of those who are abjectly identified (and depended on) but also the fear of being abjectly identifiable onself: the fear, as the word most literally means, of being 'the same as'. This latter fear is arguably a much stronger component of homophobia than of, say, sexism or racism (despite the mechanisms of projection and abjection doubtless at work in those forms of hatred), because the sexist male or the racist white is in much less 'danger' of being 'mistaken' for a woman or a nonwhite than the straight is of being 'mistaken' for a queer.

Administration is the process and agency which is responsible for the determination of the aims for which an organization and its management are to strive, which establishes the broad policies under which they are to operate and which gives general oversight to the continuing effectiveness of the total operation in reaching the objectives sought.

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.

In an examination those who do not wish to know ask questions of those who cannot tell.

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.

Democracy can be an equilibrium: a system of "self-government" in which the distinction between the rulers and the ruled disappears.

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

I'm fond of observing how obsession is the most durable form of intellectual capital.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Cultural elites in countries that dominate peoples have adapted subject people's religion for their own purposes.

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

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

We know, and we feel, that the vast business of our redemption, arranged in the councils of the far-back eternity, and acted out amid the wonderings and throbbings of the universe, could not have been that stupendous transaction which gave God glory by giving sinners safety, if the inspired account brought its dimensions within the compass of a human arithmetic, or denned its issues by the lines of a human demarcation.

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

Carolyn Heilbrun
Carolyn Heilbrun