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.

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.

In the use of this method (of infinities) the pupil must be awake and thinking, for when the infinite is employed in an argument by the unskilled, the conclusion is often most absurd.

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

I find myself just a little annoyed at the tendency of all of us to adopt certain clichés about decentralization and then glibly announce that we're for it. I have been somewhat amused at some of my colleagues who are most vocal in expounding the virtues of decentralization and yet quite unconsciously are apt to be busily engaged in developing their own personal control over activities for which they are responsible.

Not only do we cheat ourselves and those around us if we are only glum or always wary when it comes time to respond to divine stirrings. No, we are then also being simply unfaithful to the surrounding reality. The one who purges gloom has given occasions and reasons, in the midst of life's sadness, to be joyful.

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.

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.

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
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
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.

Your task as a leader is to help others to succeed, not to strive only for your own success. If I don't trust your motives, nothing else will matter -because my primary concern is your integrity.

The problem is not that of the sickness of an acquisitive society; it is that of the acquisitiveness of a sick society.

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

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.

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
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.

If you're looking for a unique solution, the last thing you should do is ask for a vote.

The Word of God was not written to satisfy our curiosity; it was written to # change our lives.

In its most basic sense, organizational memory refers to stored information from an organization's history that can be brought to bear on present decisions. This information is stored as a consequence of implementing decisions to which they refer, by individual recollections, and through shared interpretations.

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.

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

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.