American Academic Quotes

How do you discover a need that nobody yet knows about? This is where the product breakthroughs come through.

Ancient Indians had a far deeper confidence in living speech than in the moral, impersonal and derivative written communication. When words issued from the mouth of a sayer, they carried a personal endorsement.

Robert T. Oliver

Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.

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

Michael Parenti

Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the
holocaust
The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.

An inductive science of nature presupposes a science of induction, and a science of induction presupposes a science of man.

There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or whatever is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution.

[A. Merriam] neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner.

Be wary of analysts that try to quantify the unquantifiable.

Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.

Kenneth Rexroth

According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.

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

You Own Your Own Life...
To lose your Life is to lose your Future, to lose your Liberty is to lose your Present
…and to lose the product of your Life and Liberty is to lose that portion of your Past that produced it
A product of your Life and Liberty is your Property.

I'm fond of observing how obsession is the most durable form of intellectual capital.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

It is a principle of our nature that feelings once excited turn readily from the object by which they are excited to some other object which may for the time being take possession of the mind.

Matthew Simpson

General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene.

The human body comes in only two shapes and three colors. I don't expect there will be any changes, so what we learn about it now will serve us for a long time to come. The Fastest Man on Earth

Homophobia entails not only the fear of those who are abjectly identified (and depended on) but also the fear of being abjectly identifiable onself: the fear, as the word most literally means, of being 'the same as'. This latter fear is arguably a much stronger component of homophobia than of, say, sexism or racism (despite the mechanisms of projection and abjection doubtless at work in those forms of hatred), because the sexist male or the racist white is in much less 'danger' of being 'mistaken' for a woman or a nonwhite than the straight is of being 'mistaken' for a queer.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

Lionel Trilling

The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.

Thorstein Veblen

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

Ray Lyman Wilbur

As we have seen, reason is even our highest capacity in the sense that it is the only one capable of directing and criticizing all our faculties, including itself. Reason is the unqualified capacity to think and act, because it is the capacity to think and act according to norms.

When dealing with ancient sources, we cannot be content to know the religious and social settings out of which these sources have come. We should also know something about how the ancients viewed the writing of history and biography, for in the Gospels and Acts apparently we are dealing with three ancient biographies and one two-volume historical monograph (Luke-Acts).

Ben Witherington III

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they're defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles.... When prodded, they'll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations.

Children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Clayton M. Christensen