Quotes by Academics - Page 15

Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject.
Patricia Duncker
In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now is not too late. Now he must do something
J.M. Coetzee
It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.
Siri Hustvedt
Like so many other things in the previous year, my politics had also been retooled by maternity. I began to suspect that modern feminism had gotten it at least partly wrong. . . . In devaluing the home and the vast range of domestic work--childrearing included--and in fighting a fight largely for the right to work outside the home, the modern feminist movement ignored a singular power already available to women and, maybe more important, to the collective imagination. Rather than fighting to re-invent the home, or to effect a real transformation of values, or to legitimize and legalize the domestic and childrearing work that so many women engage in--which is necessary to support any mother's work outside the home--we have found it easier to map power where it already existed. Is this really my only choice? Between the intense demands of an academic career (supported by full-time childcare) and the mind-deadening contemplation of Cheerios?
Lisa Catherine Harper
And if, by the end [of this book], you reckon you might still disagree with me, then I offer you this: you'll still be wrong, but you'll be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now.
Ben Goldacre
No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.
Peter Slezak
These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.
Clayton M. Christensen
The only road to freedom is self-education in art. Art is not a luxury for any advancedcivilization; it is a necessity, without which creative intelligence will wither and die. Evenin economically troubled times, support for the arts should be a national imperative.Dance, for example, requires funding not only to secure safe, roomy rehearsal space butto preserve the indispensible continuity of the teacher-student link. American culture hasbecome unbalanced by its obsession with the blood sport of politics, a voracious vortexconsuming everything in its path. History shows that, for both individuals and nations,political power is transient. America's true legacy is its ideal of liberty, which has inspiredinsurgencies around the world. Politicians and partisans of both the Right and the Leftmust recognize that art too is a voice of liberty, requiring nurture without intrusion. Artunites the spiritual and material realms. In an age of alluring, magical machines, thesociety that forgets art risks losing its soul.
Camille Paglia
I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts.
Siri Hustvedt
It may be that only when xenophobia stops working as an election winner will the way be cleared for a return to bipartisanship
Donald Horne
Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
J.M. Coetzee
No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States but I never saw the Government of the United States.
Woodrow Wilson
The effect of legalised prostitution on women outside prostitution is to lower the status of all women. Women are recognised by the state in this system as the appropriate objects of male penetration with no consideration for their personhood or pleasure. This teaches that the penetration and use of an unwilling woman is ‘sex’, an idea that lies at the root of sexual violence against women in general. There is no chance of developing a sexuality of equality in which women’s pleasure, right to say no, and bodily integrity are respected whilst the violence of prostitution is allowed to continue with state support for men’s behaviour.
Sheila Jeffreys
REJECTION is kind of your negative ILLUSION which has no value but it’s give you a CLUE to go for next level of your ACTION.
Rashedur Ryan Rahman
The doctrine of vocation deals with how God works through human beings to bestow His gifts. God gives us this day our daily bread by means of the farmer the banker, the cooks, And the lady at the check-out counter. He creates new life – the most amazing miracle of all – by means of mothers and fathers. He protects us by means of the police officers, firemen, and our military. He creates. Through artists. He heals by working through doctors, nurses, and others whom He has gifted, equipped, and called to the medical professions.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over but when the whole man has come over heart and thought and all the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.
Woodrow Wilson
Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be represented.
Saul Bellow
Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.
Woodrow Wilson
The irony was not lost on any of us that despite the theme there was a robot on the throne.
Kathryn Davis
That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.
Siri Hustvedt
The Virtue and unpretentiousness of the wise man, which I am talking about, goes unnoticed because of its transparent ordinariness.
Alan Jacobs
This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.
Malcolm Bradbury
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
Woodrow Wilson
Bigotry against any group should be disqualifying for high office.
Alan Dershowitz
There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.
Brian Evenson
I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.
Woodrow Wilson
Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.
Alison Lurie
Brian knows the affair is wrong. He's known from the moment Wendy first undressed in his office. But with her hot, wet tongue in his ear, and her taut, pink nipples straining against his starched white shirt, and with Mick Jagger's strident voice squawking about satisfaction on the tiny transistor radio, Brian's body refuses to obey.Instead of shoving Wendy out the door, he shoves her onto the unmade bed.
Alison Lurie
We chart delusions through collective agreement.
Siri Hustvedt
In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that's good.
Saul Bellow
To die on a dying Earth - I'd live, if only to weep.
Joanna Russ
I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean.We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.
J.M. Coetzee
A nod at Beatrice who held absolutely still. "She said she would come with me. She insisted on it. She stamped her little foot at me."He pointed down to her toes as if she were a child yet.Then he straightened his shoulders. "But I sent her back to the nursery, where she belonged, and told her to play with her dolls instead. As everyone knows, a female on a hunt is a distraction at best and bad luck at worse."Which explained why Beatrice went into the woods with her hound alone, George thought. She looked now as though she had gone to some other place where she could not hear her father's words and thus could not be hurt by them. George wondered how often she was forced to go to that place.Did King Helm not see how much she was like him? It seemed she was rejected for any sign of femininity yet also rejected for not showing enough femininity, How could she win?
Mette Ivie Harrison
Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.
J.M. Coetzee
Even within our culture, there are times when breasts stop being read as bouncy sex balls: when women are breastfeeding, there's pretty wide acceptance of the fact that shouting 'phwoar' is bad form.
Emer O'Toole
A man is only as good as what he loves.
Saul Bellow
I come to listen to your pain and to hear the stories and memories of a few obsessed citizens. Jerusalem, I come to you in disguise: in over-colourful, immodest clothes and vulgar make-up... The only way I could come to you was in disguise, as a whore.
Suad Amiry
After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.
Saul Bellow
I’d never have predicted I would lose touch with him – before, that is, I did. I thought I had my reasons. But it turns out that they weren’t good reasons. It turns out that you should never lose contact with the people who are supposed to be important in your life. There is no excuse in doing that.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Asymmetrie [macht] Menschen unglücklich.
J.M. Coetzee
We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.
Woodrow Wilson
With sociology one can do anything and call it work.
Malcolm Bradbury
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
Siri Hustvedt
Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
J.M. Coetzee
Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world... But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it.
J.M. Coetzee
Not untill all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son. But in a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman's hands, there will also be no affect and no art. Men will be machines, without pain but also without pleasure. Imagination has a price, which we are paying every day. There is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us.
Camille Paglia
For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.
Saul Bellow
And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.
Saul Bellow
If sexual physiology provides the pattern for our experience of the world, what is woman's basic metaphor? It is mystery, the hidden. Karen Horney speaks of a girl's inability to see her genitals and a boy's ability to see his as the source of "the greater subjectivity of women as compared with the greater objectivity of men." To rephrase this with my different emphasis: men's delusional certitude that objectivity is possible is based on the visibility of their genitals. Second, this certitude is a defensive swerve from the anxiety-inducing invisibility of the womb. Women tend to be more realistic and less obsessional because of their toleration for ambiguity which they learn from their inability to learn about their own bodies. Women accept limited knowledge as their natural condition, a great human truth that a man may take a lifetime to reach.The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.
Camille Paglia
...human beings are able to attend to issues longer, to think harder about them, to receive deeper impressions that last longer, if information is presented in a context of emotion--a sort of hot dressing--than if it is presented wholly without affect.
Mette Hjort
All things come to him who waits- provided he knows what he is waiting for.
Woodrow Wilson
A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?
Angela Y. Davis
We should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. . . . In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says--we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make. Reading for the sheer delight of it—reading at whim—is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is.
Alan Jacobs
I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.
Marcus Speh
Taking a chance on a new author, can open your mind to new experiences.
Jonathan Taylor
Person 1: "Stay back....I have a demon inside of me."Person 2: "Let me get closer...I have a hell inside me where your demons can live."(from Dark Winter, #2 - out Halloween 2014)
John Hennessy
George was full of hatred. Of his own weakness and stupidity, of his magic, of the stubbornness and the pride of Beatrice and Marit, and, last of all, hatred of Dr. Gharn, who had started it all.But the hatred swayed to pity. Then to hopelessness. Then back to anger.Every once in a great while, he felt a moment of peace, usually when he caught a glimpse of Beatrice and Marit together. He loved them both in different ways. But that could not be.He turned away, and the cycle began again.
Mette Ivie Harrison
Change biology, and you could change society--but could you change society on its own? Were we as a species simply condemned to permanent misery, all because of how we have evolved?This was the conundrum that the Oankali books had posed to her, and the Parables had been intended (but failed) to solve: How do you create a more sustainable, more benign, more livable society when you're stuck working with human beings?
Gerry Canavan
Your name?" George asked him directly. He had probably seen the man a dozen times before yet did not know anything about him. King Davit would have no doubt have known half the man's history already."Henry."George took Henry's hand firmly in his own and looked into his eyes. This had to be done delicately, to make sure this Henry did not think him a fool. He tried to think of how his father would do it."Thank you, Henry, for your concern. It is a comfort to know I am so well guarded. I will make sure to praise you when next I speak to the lord general. But for now I think there is no need to worry.
Mette Ivie Harrison