Quotes by Academics - Page 3

I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.
Katherine Rundell
In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.
Siri Hustvedt
... sometimes love becomes a power game between ambitions that parents have for their children and the ambitions that children have for themselves.
Witi Ihimaera
Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.
Camille Paglia
1 have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty and business liberty and every other kind of liberty in the phrase that is common in the sporting world "A free field and no favor."
Woodrow Wilson
Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation
Angela Y. Davis
Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt
In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.
Ben Goldacre
It is a secret in the Oxford sense. You may tell it to only one person at a time.
Oliver Franks
It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all.
Siri Hustvedt
All business proceeds on beliefs or judgment of probabilities and not on certainties.
Charles W. Eliot
Wie Gott in Frankreich'' was the expression used by the Jews of Eastern Europe to describe perfect happiness. I puzzled over this simile for many years, and I think I can interpret it now. God would be perfectly happy in France because he would not be troubled by prayers, observances, blessings and demands for the interpretation of difficult dietary questions. Surrounded by unbelievers He too could relax toward evening, just as thousands of Parisians do at their favorite cafes. There are few things more pleasant, more civilized than a tranquil terrasse at dusk.
Saul Bellow
To know a person in his home is not to know him at all: to meet him on a country road with only his baggage is to at last contact the core, the inner cell of his personality.
John Tibbetts
People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.
Julie Rugg
If I didn't work on the assumption that people were mostly telling me the truth, I think I'd go mad... And I'd rather be mistaken about others than mistrustful of them.
Una McCormack
The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.
Saul Bellow
Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``"The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object'' (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle.She must, "be made to know that I am a 'nice piece of ass': I must be made to see myself as they see me'' (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, "Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best'" (Bartky, 1990, p. 28). Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.
Sheila Jeffreys
You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.
J.M. Coetzee
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
Saul Bellow
Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.
Scarlett Thomas
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
Gilbert Highet
Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.
Michael A. Arnzen
Page 158: 'Architecture is team work,' said Sinan. 'Apprenticeship is not.''Why don't you want us to look at each other's drawings? ' Jahan once asked.'Because you'll compare. If you think you are better than the others, you'll be poisoned by hubris. If you think another's better, poisoned by envy. Either way, it is poison.
Elif Şafak
Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers.
Kenneth A. Bruffee
No man can rationally live, worship, or love his neighbour on an empty stomach.
Woodrow Wilson
Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?
Malcolm Bradbury
The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.
Siri Hustvedt
The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
J.M. Coetzee
Christians—who have no patience with Darwinistic materialism—often sound as progressive as the most ardent evolutionist. They look for “new” theologies, “new” ways of worship, and “new” music, being quite willing to toss out their entire “old-fashioned” Christian heritage.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.
Savo Heleta
Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.
Katherine Rundell
Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine
Oliver Harris
Humans, not places, make memories.
Ama Ata Aidoo
The sun was shut up in a cold bottle.
Saul Bellow
The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
Saul Bellow
…the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.
Alan Jacobs
If present rates of improvement continue, however, we would expect the cruising range of electric cars, for example, to intersect with the average range demanded in the mainstream market by 2015, and electric vechicle acceleration to intersect with mainstream demands by 2020.
Clayton M. Christensen
It seemed like an original act, the very kindest act of being human, that he listened.
Sue Woolfe
What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.
Saul Bellow
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
Saul Bellow
You will find yourself, as he did. But that will not mean it is easy. There are few things easy in life that are worth the doing.
Mette Ivie Harrison
Sissie knew that she had to stop herself from crying. Why weep for them? In fact, stronger in her was the desire to ask somebody why the entire world has had to pay so much and is still paying so much for some folks' unhappiness.
Ama Ata Aidoo
Christianity, in contrast, is for all cultures. This is a theme of the New Testament, St. John’s vision of the redeemed in Revelation 7. Christianity is for every tribe, every nation, every language, every time, for every culture. That’s really quite unique from other religions because Christ died for the sins of the world.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.
Scarlett Thomas
[Concerning Lyotard's ideology:]... Theory ought to be recognized as part of the problem, not as a potential solution.
Bill Readings
Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me—saw me as I was at that moment—took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness.
J.M. Coetzee
Freedom: both so priceless and so expensive.
Patricia Duncker
We have, by God's grace, been given another day to serve and love, laugh and learn, pray and ponder. Spring is ready to burst into the open air, and we are ready to embrace it.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
Ok! So that's the spice. Typical gossips for or against a qualified newcomer!
Koral Dasgupta
...the rationale for the existence of literature lies precisely in its ability to work on issues that concern us deeply. And it does so in a way that keeps our motivation at its highest intensity. Literature is fuel for 'hot cognition.' One may presume that imaginative literature is a property that all human cultures possess and as such may provide humans with an evolutionary advantage.
Mette Hjort
No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.
Katherine Rundell
It’s said that sport is the civilised society’s substitute for war, and also that the games we play as children are designed to prepare us for the realities of adult life. Certainly it’s true that my brother thrived in the capitalist kindergarten of the Monopoly board, developing a set of ruthless strategies whose success is reflected in his bank balance even to this day. I, on the other hand, can still be undone by the kind of ridiculous sentimentality that would see me sacrifice anything, anything, in order to have the three matching red-headed cards of Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square and The Strand sitting tidily together on my side of the board.
Danielle Wood
...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
Ghada Karmi
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
J.M. Coetzee
The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment prevent nuclear proliferation force crooked politicians out of office reduce poverty provide quality health care for all people and even to save the lives of millions of people as it did in Ethiopia in 1984. But instead we are using it to promote sex violence and sensationalism and to line the pockets of already wealthy media moguls.’ Dr Carl Jensen founder of Project Censored
Ian Hargreaves
The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature.
J.M. Coetzee
I'm a vague conjunctured personality more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.
Woodrow Wilson
Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an ‘essence’ of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities.This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination. ‘Gender’, in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology. In the practice of transgenderism, traditional gender is seen to lose its sense of direction and end up in the minds and bodies of persons with inappropriate body parts that need to be corrected. But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist. From a critical, feminist point of view, when transgender rights are inscribed into law and adopted by institutions, they instantiate ideas that are harmful to women’s equality and give authority to outdated notions of essential differences between the sexes. Transgenderism is indeed transgressive, but of women’s rights rather than an oppressive social system.
Sheila Jeffreys
Cowardice is for cowards. Fear is for people with brains and eyes and functioning nerve endings.
Katherine Rundell