Quotes by Professors - Page 2

Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?
Peter Orner
interview from Ross E. Cheit about The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Oxford University Press, February 2014).In the foreword to your book you mention a book titled Satan’s Silence was the catalyst for your research. Tell us about that. Cheit: Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker solidified the witch-hunt narrative in their 1995 book, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, which included some of these cases. I was initially skeptical of the book’s argument for personal reasons. It seemed implausible to me that we had overreacted to child abuse because everything in my own personal history said we hadn’t. When I read the book closely, my skepticism increased. Satan’s Silence has been widely reviewed as meticulously researched. As someone with legal training, I looked for how many citations referred to the trial transcripts. The answer was almost none. Readers were also persuaded by long list of [presumably innocent] convicted sex offenders to whom they dedicated the book. If I’m dedicating a book to fifty-four people, all of whom I think have been falsely convicted, I’m going to mention every one of these cases somewhere in the book. Most weren’t mentioned at all beyond that dedication. The witch-hunt narrative is so sparsely documented that it’s shocking.
Ross Cheit
The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it’s a really popular narrative — I think it’s absolutely fair to say that’s the conventional wisdom. It’s what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that’s not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.
Ross Cheit
In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy.
Aimee Bender
There are seemingly parallel origins of Nature’s God in America and China’s Mandate of Heaven. These twin concepts created socio-political forces for public good and orderly governance, and a unique cultural ethos (related to the Creator of the Universe in America and the Son of Heaven in China) is deeply rooted in both societies. Each concept is physically yet stealthily manifested in the architectural designs of the two capital cities, Beijing and Washington.
Patrick Mendis
For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and..." The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking.
Clark Zlotchew
When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.
John C. Bean
In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.
Richard O. Prum
The strictest judges are ignorant people.
Eraldo Banovac
No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it's all a hero asks for.
John Gardner
He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won't be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It'll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.
Martin Amis
I attained a triumph so complete that it is now rare to meet an American with marks of small pox on his face... Benefits are valuable according to their duration and extent... but the benign remedy Vaccination saves millions of lives every century, like the [gift] of the sun, universal and everla
Benjamin Waterhouse
This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)
Victor Davis Hanson
What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them.
Jeff Sharlet
The history of the Bible is one of perpetual revolution. In that light, we might begin to think about the Bible not so much as a fixed thing but as a dynamic, vital tradition. In light of its history, the Bible looks less like a rock than a river, continually flowing and changing, widening and narrowing, as it moves downstream. For some, thinking about the Bible as a river and not a rock is liberating. That rock has been a millstone around the neck and a tombstone that won’t be rolled away. But for others, seeing it this way can be disorienting. That rock has promised solid foundation in a stormy world. Cling to it or be swept away.
Timothy Beal
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Building and supporting these local economies is critical to our bottom line. As repeatedly proven by Building Alliances for Local Living Economies (BALLE), spending at a locally owned business on average keeps 68 out of every 100 dollars circulating within the community. When spending on things from outside our communities, however, only 43 dollars stay local.
Richard W. Jelier Ph.D.
My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French cafe, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen door, but I didn't care about any of it.There, I ordered chicken Dijon, or beef Bourguignon, or a simple green salad, or a pate sandwich, and when it came to the table, I melted into whatever arrived. I lavished in a forkful of spinach gratin on the side, at how delighted the chef had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese, like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love. Sure, there were small distractions and preoccupations in it all, but I could find the food in there, the food was the center, and the person making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it.
Aimee Bender
from: The Portrayal of Child Sexual Assault in Introductory Psychology Textbooks - Elizabeth J. Letourneau, Tonya C. LewisOne of the central questions surrounding the debate on memories of CSA is how often false or repressed memories actually occur. The APA working group (Alpert et al., 1996) and other experts (e.g., Loftus, 1993a) noted that no reliable method can distinguish between accurate and inaccurate memories. Therefore, no one can determine the prevalence of false or repressed memories. Nevertheless, six texts (30%) implied that false memories occur frequently (see Table 1). Of these, three included the opinionated suggestion that a "witch hunt" may be occurring in which innocent parents are routinely accused of, and then severely punished for, CSA. Two texts suggested that false memories of CSA must occur because an entire support group (the FMSF) has been formed for falsely accused parents. These authors apparently failed to consider that some members of the FMSF may actually have sexually assaulted children but are motivated to appear innocent. (85)
Michelle R. Hebl
The Legend of Robert HalseyThis article examines the criminal conviction of Robert Halsey for sexually abusing two young boys on his school-van route near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Halsey's name has been invoked by academics, journalists, and activists as the victim of the “witch hunt” in this country over child sexual abuse. Based on a comprehensive examination of the trial transcript, this article details the overwhelming evidence of guilt against Mr. Halsey. The credulous acceptance of the “false conviction” legend about Robert Halsey provides a case study in the techniques and tactics used to minimize and deny sexual abuse, while promoting a narrative about “ritual abuse” and “witch hunts” that apparently requires little or no factual basis. The second part of this article analyzes how the erroneous “false conviction” narrative about Robert Halsey was constructed and how it gained widespread acceptance. The Legend of Robert Halsey provides a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wrap even the guiltiest person in a cloak of righteous “witch hunt” claims. Cases identified as “false convictions” by defense lawyers and political activists deserve far greater scrutiny from the media and the public.journal: Cheit, Ross E. "The Legend of Robert Halsey." Journal of child sexual abuse 9.3-4 (2002): 37-52.
Ross Cheit
There is a tidal wave of ignorance, Mma Ramotswe. It is a great tidal wave and it will drown all of us if we are not careful.
Alexander McCall Smith
Our best moral stories don’t tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We’re not supposed to have it handed to us.
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.
Larry Herzberg
To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.
Alexander McCall Smith
Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness.
Ruth Padel
The ultimate irony in this vast struggle (available to audience members who want to think about it but easily ignored by those who accept the semi-happy ending ) is the irony in many time loop (or ontological paradox) stories: John Connor has created himself (though he has not gone as far as the character in Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” who is both his own father and mother). Far worse, by saving his mother’s life and ensuring the destruction of the Terminator, John Connor has created Skynet just as surely as Skynet has created John Connor by trying to kill him. Both Connor and Skynet exist in a time loop without outside causality. The Terminator’s surviving arm makes Skynet possible, but it is never invented, only found and back-engineered. Kyle Reese comes across time for Sarah Connor because of a picture and because John Connor asks him to, but neither the picture nor John Connor would exist if Reese had not already gone back in time. The simplest way to save the world is to let the Terminator kill Sarah Connor. Then (in all probability), no one would find a piece of the advanced technology, and Skynet could not be built. But, Cameron’s plot suggests, the “perils to come that would result from our hubris and blind faith in technology” may be inescapable, a time loop, a feedback loop, leading directly if not necessarily inevitably to destruction."Fighting the History Wars on the Big Screen: From the Terminator to Avatar" from The Films of James Cameron
Ace G. Pilkington
The process of leniency involves accepting the reality of the current situation and finding a satisfying meaning therein, as opposed to misconstruing or denying the facts of the situation.
Sandra L. Schneider
We propose that use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in memory for details directly contributes to removing the social context of abuse from research on memory for trauma. As the term “false memories” has increasingly been used to describe errors in details, the scientific weight of the term has increased. In turn, we see that the term “false memories” is treated as a construct supported by scientific fact, whereas other terms associated with questions about the veracity of abuse memories have been treated as suspect. For example, “recovered memories” often appears in quotations, whereas “false memories” does not (Campbell, 2003).The quotation marks suggest that one term is questioned, whereas the other is accepted as fact. Accepting “false memories” of abuse as fact reflects the subtle assimilation of the term into the cognitive literature, where the term is used increasingly to describe intrusions of semantically related words into lists of related words. The term, rooted in the controversy over the accuracy of abuse memories recalled during psychotherapy (Schacter, 1999), implies generalization of errors in details to memory for abuse—experienced largely by women and children (Campbell, 2003)."from: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior
Jennifer J. Freyd
You should be aware of fake friends because it is the hardest to be aware of.
Eraldo Banovac
Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune meansan acid test of friendship.I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Anne Carson
It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.
J. Budziszewski
I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware and worthy of Your listening. I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You. I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers, but not Your countenance.They are modest, my prayers, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land. I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too. I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only implore You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together
Elie Wiesel
I have no special desire to go crawl around in caves, but I really like the word [spelunking] and want to use it in conversation. I do a lot of things just to use words I like.
Evan Mandery
I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.
Ander Monson
The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.
Jack Cady
It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.
Janet Beizer
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.
Cathy Caruth
You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steal the hubcaps.” ― Michael P. Naughton,
michael p naughton
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.
Gregory Maguire
To live for the hope of something isn’t really living at all, and so, like a child putting away its toys and picking up a tool, he marched to Lyca’s bathroom, to shower off the stench of failure, soap up the death of hope, then wash away the ashes of his love for Daphne.
Mark A. Rayner
There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly,
Alexandra Kleeman
She would never be caught unprepared again, she swore to herself. She would never trust. Never love. Never put faith in other human beings again. She would learn all she could of the shape and substance of the world, and she would find a way to survive in it.
David Anthony Durham
The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)
Victor Davis Hanson
The ultimate decision [of wearing hijab] must be that of the individual. Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant. We don't get to decide for Muslim women what does or does not oppress them, no matter how highly we think of ourselves.
Roxane Gay
In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikable. Critics who criticize a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.
Roxanne Gay
Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.
Jonathan Gottschall
It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.
Sam Lipsyte
When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.
Clark Zlotchew
Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.
Clark Zlotchew
It’s not enough to say it; you would need to take it out of your mouth, you would need to become it. You would need to become what you were born to be. In actuality, or in each reality, underneath it all—I mean, behind it—the answer lies in
Chris Campanioni
The difficulties connected with my criterion of demarcation (D) are important, but must not be exaggerated. It is vague, since it is a methodological rule, and since the demarcation between science and nonscience is vague. But it is more than sharp enough to make a distinction between many physical theories on the one hand, and metaphysical theories, such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism (in its present form), on the other. This is, of course, one of my main theses; and nobody who has not understood it can be said to have understood my theory.The situation with Marxism is, incidentally, very different from that with psychoanalysis. Marxism was once a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery and, through a more or less mild revolution, to socialism; it predicted that this would happen first in the technically highest developed countries; and it predicted that the technical evolution of the 'means of production' would lead to social, political, and ideological developments, rather than the other way round.But the (so-called) socialist revolution came first in one of the technically backward countries. And instead of the means of production producing a new ideology, it was Lenin's and Stalin's ideology that Russia must push forward with its industrialization ('Socialism is dictatorship of the proletariat plus electrification') which promoted the new development of the means of production.Thus one might say that Marxism was once a science, but one which was refuted by some of the facts which happened to clash with its predictions (I have here mentioned just a few of these facts).However, Marxism is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.Psychoanalysis is a very different case. It is an interesting psychological metaphysics (and no doubt there is some truth in it, as there is so often in metaphysical ideas), but it never was a science. There may be lots of people who are Freudian or Adlerian cases: Freud himself was clearly a Freudian case, and Adler an Adlerian case. But what prevents their theories from being scientific in the sense here described is, very simply, that they do not exclude any physically possible human behaviour. Whatever anybody may do is, in principle, explicable in Freudian or Adlerian terms. (Adler's break with Freud was more Adlerian than Freudian, but Freud never looked on it as a refutation of his theory.)The point is very clear. Neither Freud nor Adler excludes any particular person's acting in any particular way, whatever the outward circumstances. Whether a man sacrificed his life to rescue a drowning, child (a case of sublimation) or whether he murdered the child by drowning him (a case of repression) could not possibly be predicted or excluded by Freud's theory; the theory was compatible with everything that could happen—even without any special immunization treatment.Thus while Marxism became non-scientific by its adoption of an immunizing strategy, psychoanalysis was immune to start with, and remained so. In contrast, most physical theories are pretty free of immunizing tactics and highly falsifiable to start with. As a rule, they exclude an infinity of conceivable possibilities.
Karl R. Popper
Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal. For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media.
Edward Said
An ideal world inhabited by carefree people is nothing more than a utopia.
Eraldo Banovac
The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival
Richard Powers
Wear Bow World Bow
Dr. Syed Abbas Muttaqui
You know, you're too pretty for me to leave you on the couch like that," he said, pulling me toward him. I didn't know that, but I did understand then that there was no such thing as safe, only safer; that this, if it didn't happen now, would happen later but not better.
Danielle Evans
The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.
Gregory Maguire