American Academic Quotes

We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them

Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch
Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only 'religious nut' - his term for a believer - in his stable of regular reviewers.

Garry Wills
Garry Wills
Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.

Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many students graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers... reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems.

Our library has the most effective search engines yet invented—librarians who are highly skilled at ferreting out the uniquely useful references you need.

William R. Brody
William R. Brody
The library is the proper workshop of professors and students alike.

Some problems are just too complicated for rational, logical solutions. They admit of insights, not answers.

Jerome Wiesner
Jerome Wiesner
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.

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

Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.

How about "diamonds are a girl's best friends"? Nope. It should be switched around and pointed out, instead, that your best friends are diamonds.

Gina Barreca
Gina Barreca
When I was against McCarthy and I was out in Wisconsin fighting against his election, and when I was calling in the police at Harvard, I was fighting for the same principles.

If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this," Mrs. Wohlstetter wrote in her book: "We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide certainty.

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.

Remember that when an employee enters your office he is in a strange land. He feels the atmosphere of authority; he is constrained and hesitant. Make him feel at ease.

Gentlemen of the old régime in the South would say, "A woman's name should appear in print but twice—when she marries and when she dies."

I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years.... I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them.

Charles Van Doren
Charles Van Doren
Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.

The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.

I do not know of any divine commands. I do know of most important human ones. I do not know the needs of a god or of another world.... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one. I do know that the needs of humanity and this world are infinite unending constant and immediate. They will take all our time our strength our love and our thoughts; and our work here will be only then begun.

Helen H. Gardener
Helen H. Gardener
Spin' is a polite word for deception. Spinners mislead by means that range from subtle omissions to outright lies. Spin paints a false picture of reality by bending facts, mischaracterizing the words of others, ignoring or denying crucial evidence, or just 'spinning a yarn' - by making things up.

Television's overpowering images of Black deviance — its regularity and frequency — are impossible to ignore. These negative images have been seared into our collective consciousness. It is no surprise that most Americans wrongly believe that Blacks are responsible for the majority of crime.

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

Many white people experience themselves as powerless, even in the face of privilege. But the fact is that we all have a sphere of influence, some domain in which we exercise some level of power and control. The task for each of us, White and of color, is to identify what our own sphere of influence is (however large or small) and to consider how it might be used to interrupt the cycle of racism.

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

Marion Nestle
Marion Nestle