American Academic Quotes

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

Michael Parenti

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

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

William H. Starbuck

If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.

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

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

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

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.)

Future leaders will be less concerned with saying what they will deliver and more concerned with delivering what they have said they would.

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

Curiously, ghosts are rarely if ever seen in the nude. They appear fully clothed, and may even change clothing on subsequent appearances. They may change their form, to appear as they looked at different stages of their lives. Unless someone out there knows of an extoplasmic department store on the spiritual plane, we have to wonder, "Where do the clothes and accessories come from?

Christianity is not a system of philosophy, nor a ritual, nor a code of laws; it is the impartation of a divine vitality. Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without life there is no living.

Merrill C. Tenney

To discover one's own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.

William Barrett

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

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

True love offers a safe place to be you; it's not driven by a desire to rescue or a need to perform. True love values the other person for who they are and celebrates healthy separateness.

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 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

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.

In the natural sciences as in more practical affairs, how we have arrived is as important as where we have arrived.

Ernest Fox Nichols

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

We should never allow ourselves to be bullied by an either-or. There is often the possibility of something better than either of these two alternatives.

Mary Parker Follett

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.

The armature of economic neo-liberalism... cannot concede any space to the idea of counter-conduct; counter-conduct becomes inconceivable, since conduct as such is a concept fully integrated into a scientific-epistemological field. Regime of veridiction, homo oeconomicus, rational behavior, ethical and political neutralization – such is the scheme, for instance, of American neo-liberalism. In this setting, counter-conduct is nothing more than a form of irrationality, just as in the history of psychiatry, it is but a form of abnormality.

Arnold Davidson

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.