Quotes by Academics - Page 7

The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has shown that the same neural mechanisms mediate the fear response in all sorts of animals, from pigeons and rats to cats and humans. The idea that other animals experience similar emotions to us is not anthropomorphism: it is based on sound scientific evidence.

Dylan Evans

We get most of our energy from complications.

Imraan Coovadia

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

J.M. Coetzee

Poetry is born of a lack of love, born of a crazy and impossible passion...

Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

The world had edges but you couldn’t see them going, only when you were trying to come back.

Kathryn Davis

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.

Patricia Duncker

One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it's other people one can't satisfy. One thinks one's way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are nothing, you're animal and must die, and no one will know you were ever here. It's an intimation of the whole absurdity of what you are and do. It's the worst kind of despair.

Malcolm Bradbury

And she said that sometimes you wish for something very hard, it can kind of come true inside your own head, and it can seem real.

Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.

Scarlett Thomas

You have been the great green adventure of my life. Without you my days would be unlit.

Katherine Rundell

I believe, Sebastian, that novels are more important than ever. They are more important than video recorders and record players and television because they enable us to exercise our minds. They allow us to step back and see where the history is taking us.

Imraan Coovadia

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.

Scarlett Thomas

Oscar had a straightforward, dimpled, happy smile. It was one of the hundreds of great things about him.And after that we were best friends. It had been as simple and inevitable as the striking of a match.

Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.

Angela Nagle

There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word "occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with.

Refaat Alareer

Oh, the others will talk and plan and make oaths and promises, but there are precious few fuckers who will do.

Ian McGuire

The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.

Saul Bellow

I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and it was the only place where my fears were justified.

Anita Weiss

The reply to this was that Three took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill each other. There's no sense, after all, in behaving that way toward a perfect stranger; where's the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear.

Joanna Russ

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Angela Y. Davis

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.

Woodrow Wilson

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

Scarlett Thomas

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

Sheila Jeffreys

Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.

Saul Bellow

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.

Patricia Duncker

It's inhuman to take your books away before you know the end.

Katherine Rundell

But if you take pleasure in morality, then you are always in deficit.

Brian Castro

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

Sheila Jeffreys

What amazes me most is that we, as a people, have shared our collective story of being thrown out of our homeland, Palestine, with each other and with many others- actually we have bored the world with this collective story- but somehow the individual Palestinian shies away, or perhaps is too afraid, to share the very personal story of being thrown out of her or his home, living room, or bedroom. These personal stories are seldom told, not even to our own children, perhaps not even to ourselves. I guess the wound remains open.

Suad Amiry

Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.

J.M. Coetzee

My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.

Siri Hustvedt

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

Saul Bellow

When it comes to Jews, you have a two-thousand-year memory, but when it comes to us Palestinians, you have a sixty-year amnesia.

Suad Amiry

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

Saul Bellow

One doesn't commit evil actions in the belief that one is acting wrongly. What allows one to commit such acts is the belief that it will contribute to a greater good.

Una McCormack

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

S.I. Hayakawa

I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am.

J.M. Coetzee

I work for a human rights organization, which strikes me as, if not interesting in the day to day sense, at least an interesting thing to tell people at parties. I'm pleased to be doing something that sounds significant and adult.

Nell Stevens

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

Siri Hustvedt

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

Saul Bellow

You’re telling stories again. You have the disease of telling stories, Roland.

Imraan Coovadia

Effective managers proactively control their tasks and the expectations of their major stakeholders, which allows them to meet strategic goals rather than fight fires.

Sumantra Ghoshal

The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.

Siri Hustvedt

It isn’t time that folds, it’s space.

Kathryn Davis

It is doubtful that real personal change can occur without the conscious and painful process of self-criticism that is required to reject power and ego.

Janis Birkeland

We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.

Camille Paglia

It was only in a place like Paris where knowing the books someone loved, whether they followed Lévi-Strauss or Sartre, was the yardstick by which to measure them.

Imraan Coovadia

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.

Joanna Russ

Be unselfish.... If you think of yourself only you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.

Charles W. Eliot

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Siri Hustvedt

When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics.

Siri Hustvedt

What's supposed to happen, at the end of a quest? Cheers and accolades, Josh knew; people throw their hats in the air, and you glow with pride as they lift you to their shoulders. What else? Medals, speeches and a great feast, and then a ballad about your exploits, and finally, as the fireworks go off overhead, a soft, clean, fresh bed.

Isabel Hoving

New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.

Siri Hustvedt

You are not here merely to making 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.

Woodrow Wilson

Joanna Russ

Psychology either tends to glorify human beings or trivialize them, leaving out the complexity of the human soul and the demands of God.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

It is difficult to believe extraordinary things.

Katherine Rundell

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of human character is changing. The biographer has to pioneer, going 'ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions'. So, 'There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation'. She is talking about the story of Shelley, but she could be talking about her own life-story. (Virginia Woolf, p. 11)

Hermione Lee

Insanity is the only real escape from the banality of our lives. - Clara Bayliss

John Hennessy

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.

Declan Kiberd

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