American Academic Quotes

Thorstein Veblen

Lawrence Lessig

Increase Mather

William Graham Sumner

Charles William Eliot

Donald Norman

George Ticknor

Advertising as the printed form of selling would seem... ultimately to be justified in so far as it serves as a means of increasing legitimate human wants, as an agency of fair and economic competition in the distribution of goods, and as a stimulant to social progress.

Even when we say nothing our clothes are talking noisily to everyone who sees us, telling them who we are, where we come from, what we like to do in bed and a dozen other intimate things.

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

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.

People differ not only in their ability to do but also in their 'will to do'

The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up.

The medical investigator must often fish in troubled waters; and sometimes he cannot find again the promising fishing ground he has once visited, because unexpected fog prevents him from seeing the intersecting bearings of his desired ground.

Charles William Eliot

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

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.

Martin E. Marty

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

Entrepreneurs often are organizational products... The capital required, human resources, space, information, permits and licenses are all provided, perhaps grudgingly, by existing organizations.

John H. Freeman

Write down your barrier thoughts, and then consider ways to reinterpret the situation. In the process, ask yourself questions like... What else could this situation or experience mean? Can anything good come from it? Does it present any opportunities for me? What lessons can I learn and apply to the future? Did I develop any strengths as a result?

Sonja Lyubomirsky

The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.

Ray Lyman Wilbur

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

Gary Saul Morson

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.

Stephen L. Carter

Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.

In every artist we can perceive a man with both a message and a method. His message may be innate in him, but his method he has to acquire from others.

Brander Matthews

Labeling a firm as knowledge-intensive implies that knowledge has more importance than other inputs.

William H. Starbuck

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

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

I wish I was a rapper. There are certainly times when I wish I could just drop an album and channel all my ideas, anger, humor and energy into some music and be done with it.

Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health.

Rodney A. Smolla

Dog love is not the special realm of childhood or of boyhood, no matter what the movies keep telling us. It is highly significant, I think, that at both ends of human life span the bond between human and dog speaks with an insistent clarity - if we have the ears to hear.

Marjorie Garber

In the fraudulent Manichaeanism of Reason and Revelation, each the light to the other's dark, each more like the other than it knows, the Imagination seeks to be a decisive rupture.

Some men also have strange antipathies in their natures against that sort of food which others love and live upon. I have read of one that could not endure to eat either bread or flesh; of another that fell into a swooning fit at the smell of a rose...

Increase Mather