Academic Quotes

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.

That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

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.

Eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, go easy on junk foods.

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

Greed, the desire to incorporate, is magnified and fed back to produce the pretan realms, just as hate creates the hells.

Robert Thurman
Robert Thurman
Which is easier to believe in, probability or God?...The ultimate fraud is the scientific atheist who believes in probability.

The severe restrictions which Wundt placed on introspection also manifest themselves in the types of judgment that his experimental subjects were required to make. In accordance with the precept that internal perception can only become observation insofar as it is linked to controllable external stimuli, the introspective reports from his laboratory are very largely limited to judgments of size, intensity, and duration of physical stimuli, supplemented at times by judgments of their simultaneity and succession.

Kurt Danziger
Kurt Danziger
Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.

We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn't destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there's a better way: By developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.

Innovation plans, by contrast, are loaded with assumptions. Sure, some hard facts are available, but more is unknown than known. The past is no longer precedent. Thus, the innovator's job cannot be to deliver a proven result; it must be to discover what is possible, that is, to learn, by converting assumptions into knowledge as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Vijay Govindarajan
Vijay Govindarajan
Many years ago I heard a paper read by a colleague who was very philosophically astute and informed. The paper was on ethics, and it was rigorously argued, proper distinctions were made, and the critique of other points of view was cogent.... When my colleague finished his paper the man chairing the meeting said, "That's not ethics. Ethics has to do with prophecy. I learned that from Rabbi Abraham Heschel."

Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing.

In most of the European countries - France stands out in its resistance to this particular form of American cultural imperialism - the national film industries were forced onto the defensive after the war by such binding agreements.

Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
As the field of organization studies has grown enormously over the last decades, the attention the field pays to public organizations and public policy problems has withered. This despite the fact that the public sector, as a percentage of GNP, is much larger now than it was when these classics were written.

The development, strengthening and multiplication of socially minded businessmen is the central problem of business. Moreover, it is one of the great problems of civilization. Our objective, therefore, should be the multiplication of men who will handle their current business problems in socially constructive ways.

Rakesh Khurana
Rakesh Khurana
Unions are an essential part of the democratic fabric of society, but they are not necessarily desirable or acceptable in my firm or on my property.

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

Andrei Lankov
Andrei Lankov
The process of developing superior strategies is part planning, part trail and error, until you hit upon something that works.

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.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

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

George Low
George Low
Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.

This book is a product of my long-standing interest in questions relating to institutions and their relation in economic life. Initially, this interest took me to the study of the American institutionalist tradition (now often called the "old" institutional economics, or OIE) and to a series of articles on Veblen, Mitchell, Commons and Ayres (Rutherford 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1987), a line of work I have continued to pursue (1990a, 1990c, 1992a, 1992b). These pieces are written from the point of view of a sympathetic critic.

TQM is focused on everyone's satisfaction. TQM is an unyielding, continuing, improving effort by everyone in the company to understand, meet, and exceed the expectations of customers. TQM is not just a quality control program.