Top 1129 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Professors - Page 13

Hindsight plays tricks on our minds.

The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.

What’s happened is that, almost overnight, we’ve switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy in real-property recording. There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accomplished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it.

As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation "intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all: that's forgetfulness.

Don't assume that your personal moral compass, however admirable it may be, will always give you the right answer to complicated questions that require in-depth analysis.

New security architecture is being laid down in the Northern Middle East, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, in which pro-Iranian governments are consolidating their grip on the territory and they're backed by Russia, to a large degree. And this has caused great grief and consternation in Saudi Arabia and amongst many of the United States' allies, Israel, the Gulf countries, Turkey, because they see this new architecture of security and Iranian influence and Russian influence as something that's very bad for them.

An economist is a scoundrel who tells you the way things are rather than the way you want them to be.

Researchers were surprised to find that people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did. . . . people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work.

I hate to say, I kind of hope so, in the sense that, yes, Donald Trump will be terrible, but I want the Republicans just to remain divided. It's not good for the country, but I think in the end I want people to realize what a terrible guy this is, and I'm afraid that that's not going to happen if somehow he resigns or somehow gets impeached and we have Pence instead.

What the Tea Parties are standing for is constitutional principle. It's not fundamentally about tax rates or whether to have a consumption tax or an income tax. It's about adherence to Constitution and the principle of limited government.

It has been popular to threaten "small islands and low-lying coasts" with scenarios of disastrous future flooding. The Maldives has been the most utilised target. We have undertaken a careful analysis of actual sea level changes in the Maldives. No rise has been recorded either in the present or the past centuries.

John the Baptist was supposed to point the way to the Christ. He was just the voice, not the Messiah. So everybodys calling has dignity to it and God seems to know better than we do what is in us that needs to be called forth.

God’s power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy.

In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled.

Christianity is neither a system of ideas nor of morality but a way, a way of life.

In America, we need to develop communitywide structures of democratic ownership, we need to work out cooperative development, we need to work out participatory management, we need new ecological strategies developed at the local city, state, regional level.

Part of teaching is helping students learn how to tolerate ambiguity, consider possibilities, and ask questions that are unanswerable.

True creativity is impossible without some measure of passion.

If historians of philosophy are to be divided into those who focus on discontinuities and those who focus on continuities, I belong in the latter camp.

Sweetness and release can only taste the way they do after one deserves them.

Rain is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing.

The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.

I don't think religious profiling or ethnic profiling is permissible, period. That is using religion or ethnicity as a proxy for suspicion. It just doesn't make any sense.

As we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born – and particularly bad luck it is.

Modern man has yielded to the harsh, the crude, the vulgar, the profane, the immoral.

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

I personally think that we should be extremely reluctant to use a recall mechanism for an unpopular decision simply because of the message it sends about judicial independence.

I do not believe that God intended the study of theology to be dry and boring. Theology is the study of God and all his works! Theology is meant to be LIVED and PRAYED and SUNG! All of the great doctrinal writings of the Bible (such as Paul's epistle to the Romans) are full of praise to God and personal application to life.

When we're done with employer-based health insurance, it will have as much life in it as Jimmy Hoffa.

How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious... If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.

When I'm out in the ocean and I watch a seabird, I think, "Oh, I probably I know what that seabird is doing" - and I don't study seabirds. And the same for the turtles and on and on. But with the whales, a lot of the time, I have no idea what they're doing, and they're the ones I study.

When asked why he doesn't believe in astrology, the logician Raymond Smullyan responds that he's a Gemini and Geminis never believe in astrology.

Humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.

I tell my children that a man like Bill Gates has a personal fortune of $100 billion. They can't even comprehend that. Then I explain that he has more money than some countries.

A too-swift and easy coalition victory may substantially increase the risk of future wars.

A revolution in humanity's use of fossil fuel-based energy would be necessary sooner or later to sustain and to extend modern standards of living. It will be required sooner if we are to hold the risks of climate change to acceptable levels. The costs that we bear in making an early adjustment will bring forward, and reduce for future times, the costs of the inevitable eventual adjustment away from fossil fuels.

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.

We are 25 years too late. If the object is to avoid dangerous change, we've already had it. The object now is to avoid really dangerous change.

The Saint Bernards work best in teams of at least three dogs. They are sent out on patrols following storms, and they wander the paths looking for stranded travelers. If they come upon a victim, two dogs lie down beside the person to keep him warm; one of the two licks his face to stimulate him back to consciousness. Meanwhile, another dog will have already started back to the hospice to sound the alarm.

Simply put, the most powerful state is the one that prevails in a dispute.

in politics as in life, what is known is not necessarily what is believed, what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not necessarily what is heard.

The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.

Money comes to Switzerland through three illegal sources: tax evasion in other developed countries, the blood money of dictators and other rulers in the Third World and organized crime.

Animals are not property or "things" but rather living organisms, subjects of a life, who are worthy of our compassion, respect, friendship, and support.

If the professors don't start or continue to figure out who we are as a people, where we're going and where we've been, then in a sense we are not capable of passing on that knowledge to future generations.

Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.

Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even "humble" attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe.

Once Brexit has actually been implemented, the world will be a very different place.

What is the nature of true morality? I have argued ... that it must be a kind of ethics involving letting go of one's own interest on behalf of others, being ready if necessary to sacrifice one's own interests for them, even on behalf of an enemy.

Gold is not less but more rational than paper money. Money holds value so long as it is in limited supply; gold will always be in limited supply, and would require real resources to produce even from the sea; paper and printing ink are not in limited supply. The gold system is much closer to a modern automatic scientific control system than the crude and relatively unstable system of paper.

Economic development over the past two centuries has taken most of humanity from lives that were brutal, ignorant and short, to personal health and security, material comfort and knowledge that were unknown to the elites of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in earlier times.

Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake.

The temperature of the tropic oceans is warmer than it's been in 150 years

When the press writes scare stories about the global labor supply draining jobs from rich to poor places, the story is usually presented as a "race to the bottom" simply in terms of wages. Capitalism supposedly looks for labor wherever labor is cheapest. This story is half wrong. A kind of cultural selection is also at work, so that jobs leave high-wage countries like the United States and Germany, but migrate to low-wage economies with skilled, sometimes overqualified workers.

He who had known us before we were even born came to know us infinitely better as he knelt in Gethsemane and as he hung on the cross of Calvary. We come to know those we serve (Mosiah 5:13; compare 1 John 2:3-4). And we certainly come to love and treasure those for whom we sacrifice. Conversely, the depth of the pain we feel in behalf of a loved one is intimately tied to the depth of the love we bear that loved one. Thus only a being filled with infinite and eternal love could perform an infinite and eternal sacrifice.

While contemporary non-Evangelicals have virtually reduced faith to 'courageous ignorance,' Evangelicals have hardly been faithful in defending God's objective communication of truth.

Before the iPhone, cyberspace was something you went to your desk to visit. Now cyberspace is something you carry in your pocket.

We know that African American students tend to be relational learners. It's about the relationships between a teacher and student. Students respond well to teachers they know, believe in them, care about them, but also who teach in a matter that elicits a more active approach to learning, rather than just sitting and listening. The research on this is strong and has been available for a long time, but it is not widely practiced. That's a huge obstacle.

The privilege of privilege is that the terms of privilege are rendered invisible. It is a luxury not to have to think about race, or class, or gender. Only those marginalized by some category understand how powerful that category is when deployed against them.

Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.