Quotes by Professors - Page 63

Do you want to resolve a conflict successfully? Don't wait, start a conversation.
Eraldo Banovac
A happy man doesn't reconsider life.
Eraldo Banovac
Sometimes people think the old days were better than today. Even though life was simpler and slower, it was not necessarily easier.
Eraldo Banovac
In real life, the truth is a rarity, while lies are common place.
Eraldo Banovac
Human nature is so complicated. Those who have little, want a lot. Those who have a lot, think others have more. Those who lose, blame others for the loss.
Eraldo Banovac
A wise man doesn't start what he doesn't know to do.
Eraldo Banovac
Concerning mistakes, follow three simple rules. Firstly, correct a mistake that you made whenever it is possible. Secondly, don't repeat the same mistakes. Thirdly, learn from past mistakes.
Eraldo Banovac
Older people sometimes talk about the good old days when life was better. In fact, they talk nostalgically about their own youth that was irretrievably gone. The past century has made enormous progress in all fields. The standard of living, work environment, health care quality and mobility, and the availability of cultural programs, recreational activities and information – all that clearly speaks in favor of nowadays.
Eraldo Banovac
Empathize with others. You may easily get into a situation where you need the understanding of others.
Eraldo Banovac
The essence of coexistence is quite simple: live and respect how others live.
Eraldo Banovac
The wishes of an honest man do not stretch beyond what he undoubtedly deserves.
Eraldo Banovac
To observe life as an inevitability and to observe the nuanced stratification of life are two completely different points of view on life.
Eraldo Banovac
Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Life was like that- there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Many comedians are very proud of themselves for saying the things others are supposedly afraid to say. They are at the forefront of this culture of entitlement where we get to do anything, think anything, and say anything.
Roxane Gay
In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.
George Saunders
History is not coherent; moreover, the politics of coherence tend to drive history in the least tolerable directions.
Joshua Clover
What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not to politicize morals.
Karl R. Popper
I do not believe that human lives may be made the means for satisfying an artist's desire for self-expression. We must demand, rather, that every man should be given, if he wishes, the right to model his life himself, as far as this does not interfere too much with others. Much as I may sympathize with the aesthetic impulse, I suggest that the artist might seek expression in another material. Politics, I demand, must uphold equalitarian and individualistic principles; dreams of beauty have to submit to the necessity of helping men in distress, and men who suffer injustice; and to the necessity of constructing institutions to serve such purposes.
Karl R. Popper
In addition, when they talked as if city people lived by different values, they were not emphasizing abortion, or gay marriage, or the things that are typically pointed to as the cultural issues that divide lower-income whites from the Democratic Party. Instead, the values they talked about were intertwined with economic concerns.
Katherine J. Cramer
The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred,
Samantha Power
Sociopaths are attracted to politics because the see it as a sphere in which you can be ruthless and step all over people. That fact that some politicians can tell such awful lies is another example of sociopathy. Sociopaths lie—they see nothing wrong with it.
Alexander McCall Smith
In the transformed world political context of today, it is more essential than ever that the critique of democracy in the name of difference developed by oppositional intellectuals be formulated so carefully that these thoughts cannot be exploited for nationalist, tribalist, and xenophobic purposes. It is imperative that the politics of the 'differend' not be settled beyond and at the margins of democratic politics.
Şeyla Benhabib
In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murdered in the chest - without asking to be paid.
Chinua Achebe
In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest - without asking to be paid.
Chinua Achebe
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
Joyce Carol Oates
The law is so complex and voluminousthat no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand itall. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their wayto make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legalprofessionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try tokeep the law mysterious and inaccessible.
Jay M. Feinman
In famine, a focus on women and children highlights biology: here is a mother who cannot feed her child, a breakdown in the natural order of life. This focus obscures who and what is to blame for the famine, politically and economically, and can lead to the belief that a biological response, more food, will solve the problem.
Sharman Apt Russell
Anyone who objects to any government whatsoever as a form of socialism ought not to pull that socialist lever in their home, the one that makes their waste disappear in a whirlpool into the socialized sewage treatment plant.
John Médaille
Unfortunately, in a hierarchical structure, power relationships tend to determine the content; there is always the danger that a "rank-based" logic will prevail. Managers, intent on advancement, tend to supply the information they know their superiors want to hear, rather than the information they ought to hear. Large organizations tend, therefore, to become systematically stupid.
John Médaille
The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.
Martin Amis
It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.
Gregory Maguire
Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.
Benjamin Wiker
Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.
Toni Morrison
...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.
Dave Hickey
For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.
Alexander McCall Smith
If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.
Marjorie Garber
Condemnation feels good and it is now a staple of religion, politics, and the media (both left and right), but it changes nothing. Compassion, on the other hand, changes everything. (p. 121)
Robin R. Meyers
All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.
Şeyla Benhabib
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni Morrison
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison
members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet pp89-90
Richard M. Rorty
DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad.BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.(an early comment on backlash, from "Glossary for the Eighties")
Ellen Willis
Now constipation was quite a different matter...It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them for a political party - with a chance of government perhaps - but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail." (p, 195)
Alexander McCall Smith
All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that is has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.
Toni Morrison
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.
Chinua Achebe
The difference ‘twixt poet and coxcomb is precisely that the latter stops gaps like a ship fitter caulking seams, merely to keep the boat afloat, while the former doth his work as doth a man with a maid: he fills the gap, but with vigor, finesse, and care; there’s beauty and delight as well as utility in his plugging
John Barth
I don't know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.
Richard Powers
Neither (brother) even glaced at the counter. She smiled. Her dumb brothers never cooked. She didn’t think they even knew how! A human being who needs food to live but cannot prepare that food to eat? Pathetic. In this case, it was an advantage. They weren’t interested in any food until it had been cooked for them.
Nnedi Okorafor
He responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only was my fly undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI'd lose my fucking mind!
Gregory Maguire
Has anyone sen Mr Snark " "I saw him in the tunnel about 15 minutes ago." "Oh no " wailed Dr Ferman "he will have been atomised." "Oh dear" muttered an MP. "Bye-election.
Alexander McCall Smith
Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things.
Martin Amis
Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.
Martin Amis
In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.
Craig Raine
So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.
Alexander McCall Smith
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
Martin Amis
I believe that every human has a finite amount of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.
Neil Armstrong
...nothing is more precious than independence and freedom...
Viet Thanh Nguyen