Quotes by Professors - Page 31

We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.
Sherry Turkle
Underestimation has its uses.
Sherry Turkle
A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.
Sherry Turkle
If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, "I changed my mind.
Sherry Turkle
We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.
Sherry Turkle
Many times when we help we do not really serve. . . . Serving is also different from fixing. One of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, Abraham Maslow, said, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in judgment of life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.
Rachel Naomi Remen
With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.
Leslie Jamison
But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people
Chris Abani
people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world
John Barth
Nothing hurts you unless you let it.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
How can I love you if I don't know what hurts you?
Julius Lester
You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don't find every day.
Junot Díaz
The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.— Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475
Norman Cousins
The broken spine of the book shows the webbing of binder's string, and my fingers have worn white spots in the cover.
Susan Straight
I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....
Thomas Nagel
If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the multiplicity of life forms which we see on the surface of the earth and in the seas. This realization would also change the attitude that modern man has concerning the earlier periods of his own history, vis-a-vis other civilizations and also other forms of life. Consequently the theory of evolution continues to be taught in the West as a scientific fact rather than a theory and whoever opposes it is usually brushed off as religious obscurantist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.
George Saunders
The theory of evolution also had a very great effect in alienating science from religion and creating a world in which one could go about studying the wonders of creation without ever having a sense of wonder in the religious sense of that term.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which t hings as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.
Thomas Nagel
Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside
Thomas Nagel
It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.
Leon C. Megginson
The miracles of Jesus are nevertheless more than individual blessings. They are also symbols and types that reveal the full scope of Jesus' identity as the mighty Jehovah, the Creator, the one who provides for his people, and above all the Christ, who wrought the great Atonement, conquering sin and death. For people in every age Jesus can redeem from sin, change hearts and heal souls, strengthen and empower, and bring about a glorious resurrection, which are the greatest miracles of all.
Eric D. Huntsman
That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.
J. Budziszewski
More importantly, one could make the opposite argument to Leithart and Grant--that if good is guaranteed to win, then goodness becomes merely a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.
Joseph Laycock
The truth hurts, my man, but it's a good pain.
Joshua David Bellin
Do good though, will you?" She blinked brightly at the green girl. "If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?
Gregory Maguire
She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.
Junot Díaz
He said, I always thought the woman I’d marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain.
Aimee Bender
The sea is not a whore, for she is free and joyous, but she is a woman. She obeys the moon, as women do, and her depths contain both treasures and horrors, and men try to bend her to their will and rarely succeed, no matter how much money they spend in the attempt. The sea does as she wishes, and anyone who would be her lover must be her partner, not her master.
Susan Palwick
But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It's something like the gift all men wish for when they or young-- or old-- of being able to look through a woman's clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character.
Norman Maclean
At lunch you order steamed vegetables because you're remembering that you have a heart too. You feel humbled by your heart, it works so hard. You want to thank it. You give your heart a little pat
Aimee Bender
Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive.
Ben Marcus
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
Most people take health at face value. Quite often people understand that health is the most valuable possession only after they become seriously ill.
Eraldo Banovac
Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems.
Karen Sullivan
The sad irony here is that the FDA, which does not regulate fluoride in drinking water, does regulate toothpaste and on the back of a tube of fluoridated toothpaste … it must state that “if your child swallows more than the recommended amount, contact a poison control center.”The amount that they’re talking about, the recommended amount, which is a pea-sized amount, is equivalent to one glass of water.The FDA is not putting a label on the tap saying don’t drink more than one glass of water. If you do, contact a poison center…There is no question that fluoride — not an excessive amount — can cause serious harm.
Paul Connett
Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
Norman Cousins
The best six doctors anywhereAnd no one can deny itAre sunshine, water, rest, and airExercise and diet.These six will gladly you attendIf only you are willingYour mind they'll easeYour will they'll mendAnd charge you not a shilling.”-- Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows, 1990
Wayne Fields
the Reagan years "produced one of the most dramatic redistributions of income in the nation's history....The income of families in the bottom decile fell by 10.4 percent...while the income of those in the top one percent rose by 87.1 percent."Chain Reaction, 23
Thomas B. Edsall
The statue of Justice, symbol of the law, as she holds aloft her balance scale, is blindfolded. Justice is blind to race, creed, color – and to personal eccentricity. If there were a comparable state of Clio, the Muse of history, she would have to be presented with the blindfold lying at her feet, because the balance of her scales must be weighed with a conscious awareness of the facts and interpretations she must weigh.
Leonard J. Arrington
Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.
Aviva Chomsky
If our goal is to slow migration, then the best way to do so is to work for a more equitable global system. But slowing migration is an odd goal, if the real problem is global inequality.
Aviva Chomsky
...celebrating the Eucharist as a remembrance of Christ means practicing God's justice towards neighbors, strangers, and enemies alike.
Patrick T. McCormick
But when justice is done the world drops away.
Anne Carson
We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free.
Francisco Jiménez
Like honey is the sleep of the just.
Anne Carson
What's fair ain't necessarily right.
Toni Morrison
America acknowledged the greatness of Confucius through a trio of ancient lawgivers—Moses flanked by Confucius to his right and Solon on his left—on the monument to “Justice, the Guardian of Liberty” displayed on the eastern pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.
Patrick Mendis
Gurion would lament: What is the good of trying to do justice if God will kill me and my family whether or not I do justice?
Adam Levin
To be something abnormal meant that you were to serve the normal. And if you refused, they hated you... and often the normal hated you even when you did serve them.
Nnedi Okorafor
Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we’re likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we’re forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.
Sheena Iyengar
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
facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.
Leslie Jamison
It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?
Martin Amis
I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.) But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only the emotions I can prove. I'd be a unrecognizable oddity if I did.
Francis Spufford
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the trouble with people who do not believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing. It is that they will believe in anything. And the biggest anything around for people to believe in, in our day, is the State. We might put it this way. We should substitute for the wonder of the imagination the irritable flush of political partisanship. We should accept the maxim that all human endeavor is ultimately about power. Therefore education is about power. So is art.
Anthony M. Esolen
Atheist: 'I hear the voice of conscience, but I deny the reality of God.' St. Thomas: 'That is like listening to someone speak, but denying that anyone is there.' Atheist: 'That's right; nobody is.' St. Thomas: 'Then you deny not only God but conscience, because you consider it a hallucination.' Atheist: 'I misspoke. What I meant to say is that when I am listening to conscience, I am really listening to myself.' St. Thomas: 'Then you still deny conscience, because you deny its authority to judge you. Instead you claim to judge yourself, but no one can be judge in his own case.
J. Budziszewski
Breakfast seemed to be a good time for throwing your emotions around. Jodie said that at this place emotions were like Frisbees – people just tossed them around all day long like they were at a park.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz