Quotes by Professors - Page 59

We all must travel,' the driver said, keeping his eyes on the way ahead. His hands grasped the wheel firmly. 'It is the essence of all things, to move and change and keep going forward and backward and around. Even the spirits and the dead.
Nnedi Okorafor
A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—​and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?
Leslie Jamison
The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.
Gregory Maguire
We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)
Elie Wiesel
What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.
Chris Abani
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.
Elie Wiesel
No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).
Edward Said
A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.
Chinua Achebe
I wish I loved the human Race, I wish I loved its silly face, and when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "what jolly fun"!
Walter Alexander Raleigh
History...to stand in a place and know that this where you come from for a dozen generations or maybe a hundred generations or maybe more. To know there was a great city two thousand years ago in this place, and that your ancestors helped build it and lived there and worked there. When you walk down a small road, all the others who are walking there with you from before.
David Vann
To tell a ghost story means being willing to be haunted.
Judith "Jack" Halberstam
The world we have created has problems, that can be resolved by rich getting richer, bu by sharing we can. Ron Harris - 2008
Dr. Ron Harris
I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.
Sherry Turkle
Those who have chosen to provide for the health and well being of others. Call them homoeopaths, allopaths and whatever one may, they must remember, they have been called and have chosen to serve. Dr. Ron Harris - 1965
Dr. Ron Harris
Efforts by Democrats to portray Jackson as 'manly' and for the 'common man' were apparently more effective than were the campaign tactics of Adams’s supporters, who attempted to depict Jackson as violent, unjust, a paramour, and even a poor speller. It is quite possible that this anti-Jackson propaganda actually reinforced the positive image of Jackson as a masculine commoner—especially when contrasted with that of Adams, whom the Democrats depicted as an over-refined aristocrat.
Steven A. Seidman
Fillmore lost his party’s nomination the next year to yet another military hero, General Winfield 'Old Fuss and Feathers' Scott, an anti-slavery candidate who then lost the election to General Franklin Pierce (whose party’s slogan was 'We Polked you in 1844; we shall Pierce you in 1852').
Steven A. Seidman
Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work—in different countries and historical periods. Flagg’s 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country’s Army! God Save The King.' Other countries—Italy, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—designed similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg’s Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg’s 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.
Steven A. Seidman
In the years that followed the Harrison campaign, many candidates—from Colonel James 'Young Hickory' Polk in 1844 to Lieutenant John Kerry in 2004—had their 'humble origins' and/or 'war leadership' highlighted in political material. Often coupled with these tactics was a corollary, to create an image of the opposition candidate that was highly negative—from John Adams as a 'monarchist' to John Kerry as a 'flip-flopping, windsurfing elitist.
Steven A. Seidman
Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.
Alexander McCall Smith
The aim here is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.
Constance Penley
Clearly, naming the major figures in the tradition had become a tradition in itself.
Gregory Woods
The pain of what happened next lives in our collective memory. It mauls our souls each day. Yet it must be told. Silence guarantees no healing. It promises that the child's life would be forgotten and that its mission might, one day, be thought significant. Silence is the enemy of history, and history is all we have.
Daniel Black
On the latter point, it was sometimes noted that Christians gathered together under the cloak of darkness, calling one another "brother" and "sister" and greeting one another with kisses; they were said to worship their god by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of God. What was one to make of such practices? If you can imagine the worst, you won't be far off. Pagan opponents claimed that Christians engaged in ritual incest (sexual acts with brothers and sisters), infanticide (killing the Son), and cannibalism (eating his flesh and drinking his blood). These charges may seem incredible today, but in a society that respected decency and openness, they were widely ac­cepted. Christians were perceived as a nefarious lot.
Bart D. Ehrman
The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.
Chris Weedon
The death camps seem easier to comprehend if we put them all into the basket of one vast generalization, which the term "death camps" implies, but in the process we mythologize or trivialize them.
Ruth Klüger
In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it.
Ruth Klüger
How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.
André Aciman
You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.
Louis Menand
More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed.
Eric Hobsbawm
The first gang members who joined the military were known as the Hounds, a group of former New York gang members.
Carter F. Smith
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.
Karl Popper
The study of history can be sobering and shocking, and morally troubling. One does not have to believe in original sin to do it successfully, but it probably helps. By relentlessly placing on display the pervasive crookedness of humanity's timber, history brings us back to earth, equips us to resist the powerful lure of radical expectations, and reminds us of the grimmer possibilities of human nature--possibilities that, for most people living in most times, have not been the least bit imaginary. With such realizations firmly in hand, we are far better equipped to move forward in the right way.
Wilfred M. McClay
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
It is not acceptable that election winners interpret history. History should be left to historians who have a difficult task. They should try to avoid a one-sided or personal interpretation of history. Furthermore, some collective factors (such as national enthusiasm) may influence objectivity that is crucial for the interpretation of historical events.
Eraldo Banovac
10 fundamental lessons of history:1. We do not learn from history.2. Science and technology do not make us immune to the laws of history.3. Freedom is not a universal value.4. Power is the universal value.5. The Middle East is the crucible of conflict and the graveyard of empires.6. The United States shares the destinies of the great democracies, the republics, and the superpowers of the past.7. Along with the lust for power, religion and spirituality are the most profound motivators in human history.8. Great nations rise and fall because of human decisions made by individual leaders.9. The statesman is distinguished from a mere politician by four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to create a consensus to achieve that vision.10. Throughout its history, the United States has charted a unique role in history.
J. Rufus Fears
Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.
Gregory Maguire
There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.
Louis Menand
History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.
Scott Herring
The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not.
Scott Herring
No moment is ever isolatedWith history elsewhere, drilling its stitches.
Mark Jarman
Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again.
Robert Coover
We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.
Steven C. Rockefeller
Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history
Gregory Maguire
I've heard it said before that those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and I just don't know what I think about that. I figure I don't have too much use for it. The past will just weigh on you if you spend too much time remembering it.
Wiley Cash
History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins
Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
Edward Said
Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.
Gregory Maguire
History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins
Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
Edward Said
Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.
Gregory Maguire
…the traditional family structure that More supported in her writings enabled women to 'be intelligent, rational, virtuous, and noble creatures, capable of great intellectual and moral achievements. They had the potential for immense influence on their husbands and sons, on their relations, their servants, and the poor.' More held, therefore, … 'the ideal of rational domesticity helped to liberate the individual within a supportive family framework.
Karen Swallow Prior
Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts—eighteenth-century Reader’s Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain.” Good books, in contrast, require good readers: “In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.
Karen Swallow Prior
When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.
J. Budziszewski
A useful education served women best, More thought. To ‘learn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman.’ Yet, when beauty is all that is expected or desired in a woman, she is left with nothing in its absence. It ‘is a most severe trail for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources,’ she argued.
Karen Swallow Prior
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
Junot Díaz
Never forget those who helped you along the way
Heather Richardson Hayton
Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journeys. They do not need to walk off every cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can harbor the sense that there is more to life that they are being shown. Where is the secret hidden? Who has the key to the treasure box of More?
Barbara Brown Taylor
His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is not possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity, a beliver cannot be saved unless the choice to follow Christ is freely made, unless the option not to follow him genuinely exists. Compelled belief is no belief at all.
Thomas C. Foster
Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Like many writers, I lived inside of books as a child.
Roxane Gay