Academic Quotes

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.

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.

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

Marjorie Hope Nicolson

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

No matter that astronauts and cosmonauts had perished in precisely designed and carefully tested machines. Solid engineering could always provide a safety margin, because the engineers believed, there was complete safety in numbers.

William E. Burrows

Fighting terrorism is like being a goalkeeper. You can make a hundred brilliant saves but the only shot that people remember is the one that gets past you.

Paul Wilkinson (political scientist)

Integration is... leading to cultural negation.

We hardly know the limit of intelligence of individuals who can fruitfully contribute to science in one way or another if they are given the proper training – including graduate training – as assistants, as supervised or semi-independent researchers, as team members. Individuals with any of a very broad spectrum of intellectual attributes can contribute to science.

Roland W. Schmitt

Bragging is often merely a ladder we build for ourselves out of words when we are afraid we are not tall enough in the eyes of the world. It is an unwitting confession to low self-esteem.

Christianity is not a system of philosophy, nor a ritual, nor a code of laws; it is the impartation of a divine vitality. Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without life there is no living.

Merrill C. Tenney

There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

Zephyr Teachout