Top 262 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Academics

On assessment: measure what you value instead of valuing only what you can measure.

Net neutrality is the principle that the service providers who control or access, who own the pipes, should not favor some content over another. It's, you know, an even playing field for stuff on the Internet, and, you know, I think it's very important to the medium that it have a rough quality among contents. Everyone has their shot.

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.

Chance is as relentless as necessity.

Prison is the only form of public housing that the government has truly invested in over the past 5 decades

In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.

...the collapse of tsarism, while not improbably, was certainly not inevitable.

Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be differe.

My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience.

My research shows that uncertainty about your income at older ages causes more depression, causes more anxiety, which could lead to more chronic heart failure, heart disease, does actually mean shorter lifespans.

The money economy thus leaves a large ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and resources required to meet a typical consumer's needs. For example, with only about 4% of the world's population, the United States, the largest money economy, consumes in excess of one-quarter of the world's energy and materials and generates in excess of 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Social justice is what faces you in the morning. It is awakening in a house with adequate water supply, cooking facilities and sanitation. It is the ability to nourish your children and send them to school where their education not only equips them for employment but reinforces their knowledge and understanding of their cultural inheritance. It is the prospect of genuine employment and good health: a life of choices and opportunity, free from discrimination.

A religion shapes the world of its believers by identifying questions that need answers and providing answers that people 'know' to be true. ­

I've heard of many people who claim they'd as soon their children were dead as gay. What it took me a long time to believe is that these people are saying no more than the truth. They even speak for others too delicate to use the cruel words.

There is no rule of law until the Mafia needs lawyers.

The recurrence during the eighteenth century Enlightenment of the aspiration to be the 'Newton of the moral sciences' testifies to the prestige not just of celestial mechanics, but of the 'experimental method' more generally.

I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.

Successful knowledge transfer involves neither computers nor documents but rather interactions between people.

Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.

I've killed my soul by playing the victim.

The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World.

Ayatollah Khamenei actually is not the most powerful person in Iran. He does not make nuclear policy. He does not make security policy. He is one voice among many and not even the most important voice by any means.When nuclear strategy is being discussed in Iran, he is not the dominant figure to make things happen. So I think this sense which he has created to a considerable degree by his own self-promotion has made him the center of attention when, in fact, the real center of activity is some place else.

An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined faith is not worth holding.

There is no such thing as a value-free concept of deviance; to say homosexuals are deviant because they are a statistical minority is, in practice, to stigmatize them. Nuns are rarely classed as deviants for the same reason, although if they obey their vows they clearly differ very significantly from the great majority of people.

The world needs a new global architecture, additional layers of governance, to deal with issues that neither nations nor traditional forms of intergovernmental organizations can cope with.

You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept… You are not a concept, Africa. You are a glimpse of the infinite.

Corruption is the bane of Nigeria. Buhari is against corruption. Buhari is not corrupt. He is very clean and disciplined. Election rigging is worse than armed robbery. Buhari wants free, fair and credible elections in Nigeria.

The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews constitute one and the same historical lie, which made possible a gigantic financial-political fraud, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and whose principal victims are the German people - but not their leaders - and the entire Palestinian people.

Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for example, I was struck by its marginalization of any other victims apart from the Jews, to the extent that it presented photographs of dead bodies in camps such as Buchenwald or Dauchau as dead Jewish bodies, when in fact relatively few Jewish prisoners were held there.

In many ways the culmination of [Judith Butler's] thinking to date, 'Parting Ways' will confirm Butler's place at the forefront of debate about one of the most anguished political crises of our times.

What Confucius tells us to focus on first is not how to bring stability to the world, but how to be the best possible version of ourselves. To "cultivate one's moral character" is the first step towards taking responsibility for the nation, and for society. Confucius and his disciples struggled hard to be "the best version" of themselves, but their aim in this was to better carry out their responsibilities to the society in which they lived.

The vast majority of those of Scots lineage living in the Ulster counties in the 18th century had come across, or their people had come across, in the 1690s. And they were victims of famine. Over that decade, 30000-50000 people were fleeing from that disaster. In terms of per capita loss, it was of the same order of magnitude as the Irish famine (of the 19th century).

Any outside use of military power would at best furnish a temporary respite from the processes that we see playing out. We know that because we have been through all this before. The "surge" of several years ago was supposed to provide space and time for Iraqi political interests to work out their differences. 30,000 additional U.S. troops failed to lead to any working out of those differences, and the outcome is the mess we see today.

Such displays of the Australian spirit engender pride, regardless of background, religion and political persuasion. They are unifying... This spirit of leadership should be reflected in our national symbols and one appropriate way to do that is by finally making the changes needed to make Australia a republic... A country's history does not change because it takes a step forward, but its possibilities for the future do.

Suggesting evil is human doesn’t mean we can always understand it.

There is only one more thing for me to say: Please help make my forecast wrong. Together we could create a much better world.

That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.

Heaven was not so far away in the eyes of these people (the Maya), who believed that individual, civic and social truths could be revealed by consulting with nature: the shifting of the wind, the arrival of the rain, the appearance of the stars

A first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society.

The tyranny of Harvard and Yale is another thing that transcends this problem of the set point. But what's so striking about [Louis] Brandeis is he had this vision of cultural pluralism that completely gave the lie to the idea that there was any inconsistency between being Jewish or being a woman or being African American and being fully American.

An excellent introduction to the rise and fall of the British Raj, accurate, succinct, and engaging.

Teaching is a never-ending story. The work is never over; the job is never done.

The absolutist takes himself to read nature in her very own language, but the relativist insists that nature does not speak, and we hear only what we have elected to hear.

Take back the web because it is a situation that really isn't working for anyone.

There's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.

Pompous asses knows how to put the moan in sanctimonious.

The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising.

Teachers create and transform energy. They are the dynamos of educational change.

I think something that's really understudied and misunderstood is the use of information.

Liberalism demands that people without guns be able to tell people with guns what to do.

You cannot switch teachers on and off as if they were PowerPoint presentations.

Take cyber-capabilities. We have way more cyber-capability than Russia do. We could intervene in their elections easily. We choose not to do so because we're a different country. That's what Obama was trying to say.

Politics in Iran is not played like American football. It's played like chess. There are multiple moves. You're jumping ahead. And a lot of it is very subtle, and it catches you by surprise later on. So I don't want to go overboard on this.

Louis Brandeis really inspired me to write this book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet]. It was a crazy deadline. The editor said I'd miss the hundredth anniversary unless I pumped the thing out in six months, because I'd been delaying and dilly dallying for so long. So he both inspired me to get up early and write.

Acceptance of race mixture was more developed in Arab culture than in Jewish culture.

Our agenda, by necessity, is as complex and encompassing as the problems we face: beware of politicians promising simple solutions.

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

Advertising just keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It doesn't have any natural limit, and we haven't found the place for the limit. And I think it's really important, therefore, that some of the revolts that are undergoing right now, you know, whether it's ad blockers or other things, are people trying to set some lines so that we say, you know, this far but no further. And this is where it ends.