American Academic Quotes

Science does not regard its currently established truths as final: religion everywhere and in all centuries has followed the trend toward crystallization of belief.

Laban Lacy Rice

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

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

The optimism of politics before a revolution is exceeded only by the pessimism of politics after one.

Catharine R. Stimpson

Administration is the process and agency which is responsible for the determination of the aims for which an organization and its management are to strive, which establishes the broad policies under which they are to operate and which gives general oversight to the continuing effectiveness of the total operation in reaching the objectives sought.

Public deliberation is a means by which citizens make tough choices about basic purposes and directions for their communities and their country.

F. David Mathews

Much of philosophy concerns man's search for holistic concepts which will help him see a meaningful pattern in the complexity with which his perceptual world confronts him. What is new is the rapidly growing intensity of the quest, and the modern context of the search. Plato's Republic is from a world quite different from that of Boguslaw's. The New Utopians.

Richard F. Ericson

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

The last four secretaries of defense have pointed out that defense spending creates jobs. So do pornography, prostitution, and narcotics.

Michael Parenti

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

Stephanie Pace Marshall

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

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

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.

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

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

Ray Lyman Wilbur

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

Arrogance rides triumphantly through the gates, barely glancing at the old woman about to cut the rope and spring shut the trap.

Near the end of the 1700s, philosophers began to declare that humans were rational individuals. People were flattered by being recognized as individuals, and by being called rational, and the idea soon wormed its way into the belief systems of nearly everyone in the upper class. Despite resistance from Church and State, the idea of rational individuality replaced the assumption that truth comes only from god and king.

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

Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude.

Richard Mitchell

There is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing "messes" incapable of technical solution.,..In the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern.

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.

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.