Academic Quotes

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

John Dominic Crossan

Was sorcery a gift given to a few, like poetry? Did the Lord come, lift you up, then drop you forever?

Charles R. Johnson

Desire for God without doctrine is blind; doctrine without desire is empty.

Kevin Vanhoozer

I seem to see a great university, great in endowment, in land, in buildings, in equipment, but greater still, second to none, in its practical idealism, and its social usefulness.

Robert Clarkson Clothier

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 ?

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility.

Henry Chadwick (theologian)

Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Hangeul must unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind.

Geoffrey Sampson

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

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

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)

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

Integration is... leading to cultural negation.

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.

Chase him down the alley
put him behind bars
in a basement and charge him rent.

For India, Kashmir lends credibility to its secular nationalist image.

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.

Let's take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?

We hear people say, "We tried integration and it failed." That isn't so. Integration has never been tried in this country. It has not even been defined. What is integration? If you put two, three blacks in an all-white institution, it's not integrated. It requires a complete change in the way you think as an institution. Real integration involves a change in values.

Lerone Bennett Jr.

A child does not want the alphabet (that is, the simple principles) of science anymore than he wants the names of the letters of the alphabet when learning to read.

Charles Alexander McMurry

Any unique image that you desire probably already exists on the internet or in some database... the problem today is no longer how to create the right image, but how to find an already existing one.

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.

Openness without strength is useless; strength without openness is oppression.

Daniele Bolelli

No one has more than scratched the surface when it comes to understanding and explaining the miracle of the market.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. (Terullian) When she ceases to bleed, she ceases to bless. She can thrive through persecution, but never through peace and plenty.

Identity is marketed in national capitalism as a property. It is something you can purchase, or purchase a relation to. Or it is something you already own that you can express: my masculinity, my queerness. But identity need not be simply a caption for an image of an unchangeable concrete self. It is also a theory of the future, of history.