Academic Quotes

Legal concepts are supernatural entities which do not have a verifiable existence except to the eyes of faith.

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

Richard A. Horsley

I shouldn't be naive Diana said. Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power—and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.

Our view of nature will influence the way we treat nature, and our view of human nature will affect our understanding of human responsibility.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Jonathan Culler

One ceases to be lonely only in recollection; perhaps that is why people read history.

John Andrew Rice

Instead of exposures to toxic materials and mechanical dangers, we are discovering the toxicity of social circumstances and patterns of social organization.

Richard G. Wilkinson

Love is learning the song in someone's heart and singing it to them when they forget.

The medical investigator must often fish in troubled waters; and sometimes he cannot find again the promising fishing ground he has once visited, because unexpected fog prevents him from seeing the intersecting bearings of his desired ground.

Charles William Eliot

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.

The pleasure of their [the Imagists'] poetry is not the satisfaction of discovering little by little, but of seizing at a single blow, in the fullest vitality, the image, a fusion of reality in words.

Information establishes a relation between things and agents.

Violent predators are not like the rest of us. They kill for fun, for sport, for the sake of it. To compare them to animals is an insult to animals. To expect that we can rehabilitate them assumes a will to change.

The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets.

Qurratulain Hyder

Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies. It creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation.

Stephanie Pace Marshall

I do not know of any divine commands. I do know of most important human ones. I do not know the needs of a god or of another world.... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one. I do know that the needs of humanity and this world are infinite unending constant and immediate. They will take all our time our strength our love and our thoughts; and our work here will be only then begun.

Helen H. Gardener

To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart.

William Macneile Dixon

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

To discover one's own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.

William Barrett

So at bottom Foucault's enterprise seems stuck on the horns of a huge epistemological dilemma: if it tells the truth, then all knowledge is suspect in its pretense of objectivity; but in that case, how can the theory itself vouch for its truth? It's like the famous paradox about the Cretean Liar—and Foucault seemed quite unable to get out of it (which explains why he didn't even try to face it).

José Guilherme Merquior

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

Still, wouldn't you, even if entirely secure in your own sense of direction, be at least curious where others were heading, even as you struck out on your own ?

TQM is focused on everyone's satisfaction. TQM is an unyielding, continuing, improving effort by everyone in the company to understand, meet, and exceed the expectations of customers. TQM is not just a quality control program.

The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

It is difficult to be humble. Even if you aim at humility, there is no guarantee that when you have attained the state you will not be proud of the feat.