Quotes by Academics - Page 6

Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.
Dimitri A. Bogazianos
There is a certain mysticism in the Christian's affirmation of the physical universe. There is a confidence that whatever is discovered conforms with Jesus Christ and is a manifestation of His will.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
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
The noise of the world is so terrible that we can endure it only by being coated with sleep.
Saul Bellow
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
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
My point is that when you fall in love it's with a real person with flaws. Not with a perfect character from a fairy tale.
Mette Ivie Harrison
I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness.
Saul Bellow
Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before.
Siri Hustvedt
Progress in science and technology is real, but it builds on past truths without rejecting them. Computers don’t have to be re-invented in order to keep getting better; innovations expand what they already do. Knowledge accumulates, so it can increase. Scientists and engineers know this, but artists, authors, and philosophers keep trying to start over from ground zero in the humanities. Thus, they don’t really progress—they become primitive.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
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
To measure market needs, I would watch carefully what customers do, not simply listen to what they say. Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group. Thus, observations indicate that auto users today require a minimum cruising range (that is, the distance that can be driven without refueling) of about 125 to 150 miles; most electric vehicles only offer a minimum cruising range of 50 to 80 miles. Similarly, drivers seem to require cars that accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds (necessary primarily to merge safely into highspeed traffic from freeway entrance ramps); most electric vehicles take nearly 20 seconds to get there. And, finally, buyers in the mainstream market demand a wide array of options, but it would be impossible for electric vehicle manufacturers to offer a similar variety within the small initial unit volumes that will characterize that business. According to almost any definition of functionality used for the vertical axis of our proposed chart, the electric vehicle will be deficient compared to a gasolinepowered car.This information is not sufficient to characterize electric vehicles as disruptive, however. They will only be disruptive if we find that they are also on a trajectory of improvement that might someday make them competitive in parts of the mainstream market. The trajectories of performance improvement demanded in the market—whether measured in terms of required acceleration, cruising range, or top cruising speed—are relatively flat. This is because traffic laws impose a limit on the usefulness of ever-more-powerful cars, and demographic, economic, and geographic considerations limit the increase in commuting miles for the average driver to less than 1 percent per year. At the same time, the performance of electric vehicles is improving at a faster rate—between 2 and 4 percent per year—suggesting that sustaining technological advances might indeed carry electric vehicles from their position today, where they cannot compete in mainstream markets, to a position in the future where they might.
Clayton M. Christensen
One of the most distinctive features of psychosis is its dynamic of externalization. Madness is experienced as being enacted on the subject from without; a person perceives his own unintegrated psychological contents as outer-world creatures and demons who threaten to engulf and physically destroy him. The barriers between inner and outer, subject and object, dissolve so entirely that no boundary remains to protect the ego from the onslaught of this projected unconscious material.
Victoria Nelson
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
Woodrow Wilson
A girl in a crown of stars was coming toward him, but before she could see who he was he slipped through his curtains of flesh.
Kathryn Davis
Wolves, and stars, and snow: Those things made sense.
Katherine Rundell
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
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.
No man can rationally live, worship, or love his neighbour on an empty stomach.
Woodrow Wilson
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
For something to be a crime there must be both an actus reus and mens rea — that is, a criminal act accompanied by a criminal state of mind.
Alan Dershowitz
I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.
Saul Bellow
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
..it lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The students could be, as it were (he said), the rubbing post for the thought of his teacher.
Malcolm Bradbury
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
Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
Saul Bellow
A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.
Woodrow Wilson
Ok! So that's the spice. Typical gossips for or against a qualified newcomer!
Koral Dasgupta
I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.
Woodrow Wilson
You're a kid,' said Alexandra. 'There is no just about it. Only adults say just a kid and what the heck do they know about anything? Have you looked at their world lately?
A.J. Hartley
The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.
Siri Hustvedt
Now don't jerk me around. This is the Midlands. There are no vampires here, and dressing up like one doesn't make it so. You can't even tell me how he's got no marks on his neck!""Oh yes I can. It's the twenty-first century. These days we tend to clean up after ourselves.
John Hennessy
You're a vampire?""Yes.""So what does that make me, your victim?""You're clearly not as dumb as you look.
John Hennessy
There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.
J.M. Coetzee
The first questions naturally raised by a person emerging from the fog of childhood are the same questions that led Aristotle and other great philosophers to think and write deeply on the subjects of first philosophy and ethics.
Alan E. Johnson
The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single typeof propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see such a notion as not even admissible, if at all desirable. The world of these academic refuseniks is, however, a bleak and sterile place. Disarmed by their own epistemic fiat, scholars cannot assert anything since they deny the idea of objective rationality. If they arrive at an insight whose truth they wish to defend – for example that truth and rationality are passé – they can’t do so because truth and rationality are constructed to be constructed.
Peter Swirski
Children, Hadley thinks to herself, children are more civilised than this gang on the sauce.
Naomi Wood
There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be.
Scarlett Thomas
When love comes, it comes indiscriminately.
Lesley Lokko
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
One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one's own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would wish to find the strength to beautify one's thoughts and to purify one's heart. It is everyone's hope and expectation to live in serenity and to plod along in transparency: the palms of the hands patiently directed towards heaven, at the heart of all this modernity.
Tariq Ramadan
The Sufi Islam practiced in northern India is quite different from the Shi'a Islam practiced in Lebannon, which in turn is different from the Sunni Islam practiced in Pakistan. Even within a single branch of Islam there are customs and practices that vary by region and across time. Thus, the Islam of seventh-century Arabia is different from the Wahhabism that exists today in Saudi Arabia.
Deepa Kumar
I have written this book with the conviction that the response to injury does not have to be vengeance and that we need to distinguish between revenge and justice. A response other than revenge is possible and desirable. For that to happen, however, we need to turn the moment of injury into a moment of freedom, of choice. For Americans, that means turning 9/11 into an opportunity to reflect on America's place in the world. Grief for victims should not obscure the fact that there is no choice without a debate and no democracy without choice.
Mahmood Mamdani
In a proper Islamic University, fard 'ain knowledge which represents the permanent intellectual and spiritual needs of the human soul--should form the core curriculum, and should be made obligatory to all students. Fard kifayah knowledge--reflecting societal needs and global trends--is not obligatory to all, but must be mastered by and adequate number of Muslims to ensure the proper development of the Community and to safeguard its proper place in world affairs. The fard 'ain knowledge shall include knowledge of the traditional Islamic sciences such as the Arabic language, metaphysics, the Qur'an and Hadith, ethics, the shari'ah sciences, and the history of Islam. Consonant with our position that these fard 'ain sciences are not static but dynamic, they should be continuously studied, analyzed, and applied in relation to the fard kifayah sciences; i.e. the fields of their specialization.
Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud
The concept of ta'dib, if properly understood and competently explicated, is the correct concept of education in Islam, and not ta'lim or tarbiyah, which are currently in vogue among Muslims all over the world. this is because ta'dib already includes within its conceptual structure the elements of knowledge ('ilm), instruction (ta'lim), and good breeding (tarbiyah).
Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud
I lived in my head most of the time— a lonely and messed up place —and suddenly there was a higher force called Allah I could lean on. A companion, who'd travel with me this road less trodden... My life. Islam means surrendering yourself to God.
Fadia Faqir
The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.
Marcus Speh
a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
Robert Macfarlane
If something wants to be a story, it will be.
Scarlett Thomas
Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.
Refaat Alareer
people often ignore the misfortune of others, you see. The world is a heartless place but it's not always because they don't care. It's sometimes because the are embarrassed, or because they don't know what to say, or because they simply cannot beat ro look into the eyes of someone who is suffering.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Every new form of communication brings with it a perennial angst about what it is doing to our brains. We are not the first to feel that everything is changing too quickly around us, and we won't be the last. Throughout history, communication technologies have been catalysts of societal and cultural change that upset the status quo.
Alfred Hermida
Of course there’s another choice, he thought. There is always another choice. I’m just not going to take it.
Brian Evenson
It is up to the individual to 'choose' their repertoire of the self. If they do not have access to the range of narratives and discourses for the production of the ethical self they may be held responsible for choosing badly, an irresponsible production of themselves
Bev Skeggs
Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake?
John B. Heywood
What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?
J.M. Coetzee
As his (C. S. Lewis's) good friend Owen Barfield once remarked, Lewis radiated a sense that the spiritual world is home, that we are always coming back to a place we have never yet reached.
David C. Downing
If our ideas and beliefs are held with an awareness of abstracting, they can be changed if found to be inadequate or erroneous. But if they are held without an awareness of abstracting-if our mental maps are believed to be the territory-they are prejudices. As teachers or parents, we cannot help passing on to the young a certain amount of misinformation and error, however hard we may try not to. But if we teach them to be habitually conscious of the process of abstraction, we give them the means by which to free themselves from whatever erroneous notions we may have inadvertently taught them.
S.I. Hayakawa
To die on a dying Earth - I'd live, if only to weep.
Joanna Russ
This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.
Siri Hustvedt