Academic Quotes

This type of engineer is the leaven that leavens the whole of the country. If a country has plenty of creative engineers doing real creative work, it moves forward with the times. If it does not, it falls behind, however good all its other people are.

Meredith Thring

In the accelerating pace of scientific advance, perspective is often a casualty.

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

It is true that the torch of science grows brighter with each passing year, and shoots its rays deeper into the enveloping darkness, but mystery is ever with it. Science proposes more questions than it solves.

William Louis Poteat

Near the end of the 1700s, philosophers began to declare that humans were rational individuals. People were flattered by being recognized as individuals, and by being called rational, and the idea soon wormed its way into the belief systems of nearly everyone in the upper class. Despite resistance from Church and State, the idea of rational individuality replaced the assumption that truth comes only from god and king.

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.

If we could produce one or two more Madame Curies, that would accomplish far more for the advancement of women than any amount of agitation, argument and legislation.

Virginia Gildersleeve

Adam was created from a handful taken from the whole earth. Thus, his sons carried exactly the nature of the colors of the earth. Some were red, others white and some were black. Some were good-natured, others ill-natured while some were vicious and some virtuous.

Ahmad Baba al Massufi

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.

If there are no general moral truths, the object of I scientific ethics cannot be to fix rules for human conduct, the aim of all science being the discovery of some truth.

Edvard Westermarck

The money economy thus leaves a large ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and resources required to meet a typical consumer's needs. For example, with only about 4% of the world's population, the United States, the largest money economy, consumes in excess of one-quarter of the world's energy and materials and generates in excess of 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

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

Brian Martin (social scientist)

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.

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power-the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

Erik Brynjolfsson

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.