Academic Quotes

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.

Joan Chittister

He told me that it only seemed reasonable that if there were female studies programs there should be something for men. My answer was that we already had men's studies — it was called education.

Arlene Voski Avakian

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

The plants we've chosen will collect and cycle Earth's minerals, water, and air; shade the soil and renew it with leafy mulch; and yield fruits and greens for people and wildlife.

Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.

Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse.

Hazel Henderson

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.

Roberta Wohlstetter

Decision makers operating under excessive scrutiny tend to make the choices that are the easiest to justify rather than those they think are the best.

Robert I. Sutton

Remember that when an employee enters your office he is in a strange land. He feels the atmosphere of authority; he is constrained and hesitant. Make him feel at ease.

We cannot recollect the ignorance in which we were born.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac

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

American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Michael Mandelbaum

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.

It was always about love. Always, always about love. Lost love, love denied, the obsessive hunger for love. Parental or romantic. Whether it was twisted or pure, fulfilled or unrequited, love was always at the source.

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.

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

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

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

Spin' is a polite word for deception. Spinners mislead by means that range from subtle omissions to outright lies. Spin paints a false picture of reality by bending facts, mischaracterizing the words of others, ignoring or denying crucial evidence, or just 'spinning a yarn' - by making things up.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

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

The human being is not a fallen being in need of redemption but rather a forgetful being who must be reminded of God and his own nature.

Joseph E. B. Lumbard

I am six years old and instead of celebrating with birthday cakes, I chew on a piece of charcoal.

Right now, no sane and unbiased person would be so stupid as to doubt that the North Korean state is very repressive.

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

Peter Conrad (academic)

We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.