Top 1129 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Professors - Page 16

Promoting open and critical and respectful scientific discourse seems like a pretty good goal to me.

Pre-suasion is the practice of getting people sympathetic to your message before they experience it. It's the ability to cause people to have something at the top of their consciousness that makes them receptive to your message that's yet to come.

Like begets like; honesty begets honesty; trust, trust; and so on.

Humans are particularly interesting; our culture is incredible, there's no doubt about that. In many respects, no other species matches ours. But in quite a few respects, they do, and that can help us, perhaps, to better understand our own culture. We look at the ways humans are similar to other animals, and at the ways they differ, rather than just saying, "We have culture and you don't."

If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up.

The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers ... is absurd.

One of the paradoxes of liberal societies arises from the commitment to tolerance. A society committed to respecting the viewpoints and customs of diverse people within a pluralistic society inevitably encounters this challenge: will you tolerate those who themselves do not agree to respect the viewpoints or customs of others? Paradoxically, the liberal commitment to tolerance requires, at some point, intolerance for those who would reject that very commitment.

Think about that: at a time when it was inconceivable to have a woman rabbi or a woman scholar of Christian theology or canon law, the Islamic civilization boasted hundreds of women who were authorities in Islamic law and Islamic theology and that taught some of the most famous male jurists and left behind a remarkable corpus of writings.

That is a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans.

We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.

We cannot afford to lose another decade. If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.

Most of the problems that plague our society - addiction, overeating, crime, domestic violence, prejudice, debt, unwanted pregnancy, educational failure, underperformance at school and work, lack of savings, failure to exercise - are in some degree a failure of self-control.

In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.

The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.

When Clark Gable, MGM's most popular and famous leading man asked for a percentage of the profits from his films, he was flatly refused. A top executive was reported to have said, He's nobody. We took him from nobody. We lavished him with lessons and publicity and now he's the most desired man in the world. Who taught him how to walk? We straightened his teeth and capped them into that smile. We taught this dumb cluck how to depict great emotions, and now he wants a piece of the action? Never!

By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this - if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural - then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.

Frances Bellamy thought the changes spoiled the poetry of it. He was a pretty stern guy. Everybody has some sense of humor, but I don't think he had much.

The main activity of programming is not the origination of new independent programs, but in the integration, modification, and explanation of existing ones.

The painter who strives to represent reality must transcend his own perception. He must ignore or override the very mechanismsin his mInd that create objects out of images(symbols)... The artist, like the eye, must provide true images and the clues of distance to tell his magic lies.

The brand is lying about something, or at least misrepresenting it. When I read a bottle of shampoo or moisturizer or other beauty product, I always perceive a dark subtext. The words haunt me. It comes across as humorous to the reader/audience, but in fact the words really do make me a little bit queasy. Nothing is as easy or natural as consumer brands want us to think - no problem is as resolvable. Your hair will fall out, eventually. Yet we do have these brands, and we line our shelves with them. There's an inherent irony.

The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.

The [Kwanzaa] holiday, then will of necessity, be engaged as an ancient and living cultural tradition which reflects the best of African thought and practice in its reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person in community and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it, and the rich resource and meaning of a people's culture.

Our ancestors were eating meat over 2.5 million years ago. We mainly ate meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and nuts. We have to assume our physiology evolved in association with this diet. The balanced diet for our species was what we could acquire then, not what the government and doctors tell us to eat now.

Unless we redesign our civilization in numerous ways, all of the science in the world won't save us.

People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence

A famous actor, Edmund Kean, on his deathbed, was reported to have said, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

So guys who are otherwise sensitive and thoughtful say and do ridiculously dumb things to impress other guys. It's an enormous performance, but guys know that if they fail, they'll be ridiculed as sissies mercilessly.

Voltaire was a smart cookie.

Man is a wanting animal - as soon as one of his needs is satisfied, another appears in its place. This process is unending. It continues from birth to death.

The movement really has evolved because their initial demands [such as factory codes of conduct and disclosure of supplier names and addresses] have virtually all been met. This recent idea of factory certification is building on what they got some time ago.

Women who love women, who choose women to nurture and support and to create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently, are lesbians.

Most Americans watch Friends rather than having friends.

Theology is faith seeking understanding, but understanding is more than theoretical. If we really grasp who and where we are as disciples, we should know how to live out our faith.

The window of opportunity to avert famine is rapidly closing and could already have closed. The real issue facing us is not whether there will be famine but how many people will actually die.

Enterprises have customers! Ask them for feedback and you can compete with startups!

If you asked a sample of Americans "What is the temperature of Mars?" about 8% would say they don't know.

The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management.

Self-evidently, dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking.

If your aspirations are not greater than your resources, you’re not an entrepreneur.

Truth is now simply a matter of etiquette: it has no authority, no sense of rightness, because it is no longer anchored in anything absolute. If it persuades, it does so only because our experience has given it its persuasive power, but tomorrow our experience might be different.

Folic acid deficiency does the same thing as radiation.

One of the reasons that any person writes anything is to try and keep his own sanity together.

Palestinian Arabs [are] people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.

The fact that both Jews and Christians ignore some of God's or Jesus's commands, but scrupulously obey others, is absolute proof that people pick and choose their morality not on the basis of its divine source, but because it comports with some innate morality that they derived from other sources.

Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don't.

It is sad to witness the persistence in our society of the racism and xenophobia that seems to be a permanent part of our political culture. It is shameful to see politicians exploiting these human weaknesses in order to gain political power. It is most depressing of all to contemplate a future in which politicians who do this will continue to have influence over people's lives.

One cannot achieve peace without realizing justice, realize justice without seeking out the truth, seek out the truth without practicing freedom. So living and thinking free is the root of achieving peace in our world.

The language itself is what gets me interested in writing. It's weird to me that words exist. Never a dull moment with words. They're a layer between our minds and the physical reality around us, obviously, but the layer seems like it's always in flux, like an asteroid belt, constantly moving.

If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings. In sum, our intentional, effortful activities have a powerful effect on how happy we are, over and above the effects of our set points and the circumstances in which we find themselves. If an unhappy person wants to experience interest, enthusiasm, contentment, peace, and joy, he or she can make it happen by learning the habits of a happy person.

I have leukemia, and my chemotherapy has destroyed my immune system.

They offer, if we are wise enough or simple enough to take it, a model for what it means to give your heart with little thought of return. Both powerfully imaginary and comfortingly real, dogs act as mirrors for our own beliefs about what would constitute a truly humane society. Perhaps it is not too late for them to teach us some new tricks.

God cursed those who are the sons of Israel, through David and Jesus, the son of Mary. Those people, God made monkeys and pigs.

Politics has become very unpredictable, making things so very difficult for individuals and also for companies.

We go to sanctuaries to remember the things we hold most dear, the things we cherish and love. And then-the great challenge-we return home seeking to enact this wisdom as best we can in our daily lives.

In the last few decades we have seen the extraordinary rise of ecosocialist movements around the world inspired in large part by Marx's ecological critique of political economy. Marx was indeed influenced by some of the earliest attempts to develop what we now call an ecological-systems view, rooted in the concept of metabolism. Building on this perspective, Marx defined socialism as the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolism between society and nature in such a way as to conserve energy and to promote the satisfaction of human needs.

It is possible to have pardon without forgiveness-a murderer can be pardoned by the governor, but that does not mean the victim's family has forgiven him. And there can be forgiveness without pardon.

Law..is too important to be left to the lawyers.

Harper Lee was legendarily private. I've never known such a private woman in my life. It's no surprise that she left Monroeville, a gossipy little southern town where everybody wants to know everybody's business, and went to the most anonymous city in America.

Authenticity is critical to leadership. That means trying to be yourself - this involves some self-disclosure, admitting what you don't know and being willing to ask questions.