Top 1129 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Professors - Page 9

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

You have a chance of learning -- if you want to and youre not arrogant.

Do good in the name of children. Do good in the name of public health.

I think it's important to understand that North Carolina has been ground zero for conservative backlash.

I think that we see some cities that have developed living wage ordinances. I think that we see some efforts to actually put real restrictions on unscrupulous behavior by creditors. I think that the Consumer Finance Agency is a reflection of a political reaction to the abuses behind the financial disaster. I hope the system will continue to react.

In the next 50 years, the increasing importance of designing spaces for human communication and interaction will lead to expansion in those aspects of computing that are focused on people, rather than machinery.

White men in Europe and the US are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world; it is called the history of the world.

Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.

Beware of economists who hide assumptions.

If Rip Van Winkle came back, there's only one institution he would recognize: "Oh! That's a school. Kids are still sitting in rows, still listening to the font of wisdom at the front of the classroom."

Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest.

Historically, measures initially directed at foreign nationals have subsequently been extended to citizens. What happens is foreign nationals are the easiest targets and most vulnerable targets, so they're the initial targets. But government officials, once you give them a certain kind of power over individuals, they get used to it and almost inevitably seek out ways to extend it. You will see that virtually every form of repressive government measure that has been employed in the United States against citizens started out as an antialien measure and was then extended to citizens.

Stuart Clark's The Sun Kings is undoubtedly the most gripping and brilliant popular-science history account that I have ever read. It is informative, accurate, and relevant. Clark's ability to write so vividly makes me seethe with jealousy.

Carbon-free energy is simply something we have to do. The time for talk is past. If we turn around net carbon emissions by 2020 rather than 2040, we get another 2° of fever rather than 3° - and that's a big difference.

Being a systematic theologian allows me to indulge all my interests - in literature, film, art, music - by relating them all to God.

In a nutshell, the fountain of happiness can be found in how you behave, what you think, and what goals you set every day of your life.

Plan your day with an eye to your tendency to procrastinate, and put in safeguards to keep it to a minimum.

I believe the message in the hymn "Rise Up, O Men of God" (Hymns, no. 324) is a plea, a call, a divine invitation for us to rise above the telestial tinsel of our time; to deny ourselves of ungodliness and clothe ourselves in the mantle of holiness; to reach and stretch and grasp for that spiritual direction and sacred empowerment promised to the Lord's agents, to those charged to act in the name of our Principal, Jesus Christ; and to point the way to salvation and deliverance and peace in a world that finds itself enshrouded in darkness, a world that yearns for spiritual leadership.

It is cheaper to pay mathematicians and computer scientists to design algorithms that will eliminate webspamming, rather than to pay lawyers to do lawsuits.

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

In a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (i.e. patents) from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm’s business should be taken outside the company.

If you are the kind of person who listens to conservative advice, you may do okay in life, but you probably won't ever be a fantastic leader. You have to take risks, and you also have to go against conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom doesn't make for startling advances in society.

Life should not be measured by time. The only thing that counts is how one uses the time one has.

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Humans are a part of nature, not apart from nature.

The strategy behind the Kyoto Protocol has no grounding in economics or environmental policy.

Trophies should go to the winners. Self-esteem does not lead to success in life. Self-discipline and self-control do, and sports can help teach those.

It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.

There's nothing I like more than meeting velvet clad peers while wrapped in a towel.

The critical question is how a religious tradition is interpreted. Is it interpreted in ways that are pro-human rights or in ways that are a throwback to the Dark Ages?

The problem is the Palestinians don't recognize the legitimacy of Israel.

I want to assure you that regardless of your circumstances, age, or sex, you can indeed start over, re-arousing from within yourself those earlier, more innocent expectations, feelings and beliefs. It is much better if you can imagine this endeavor more in the light of children's play, in fact, rather than think of it as a deadly serious adult pursuit.

There are cases in which somebody has demonstrated just such an outrageous disregard for the bounds of an acceptable decision that you want a measure of accountability.

What really matters from the point of view of social capital and civic engagement is not merely nominal membership, but active and involved membership.

Education can change the scope of an entire family

For what I give, not what I take, For battle, not for victory, My prayer of thanks I make.

The fantasy of doing a task perfectly is common with procrastinators; they set the bar for success very high. Then they are afraid to approach it. As the deadline approaches, they must set the bar lower.

We are not just scientists, but human beings as well. Like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.

If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.

The top 400 people own more wealth now than the bottom 185 million Americans taken together. That is a medieval structure.

I can't speak for others, but I find the fundamental idea that a life worth living is one during which one strives every day to become a better person to be compelling.

While there have been great technological advances in the study of the brain, yielding enormous amounts of data on its physical and psychological characteristics, the old problem of relating mind to brain in a reasonable fashion remains unaccomplished.

If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation.

If one or two works from a body of work for an exhibition are what you would like to be remembered by, it is a good exhibition.

Adults have their own issues and their own problems, which are understandable, and some adults are working through their own adolescent issues.-

There is abundant reason to believe that optimism - big, little, and in between - is useful to a person because positive expectations can be self-fulfilling.

Positive people are able to maintain a broader perspective and see the big picture which helps them identify solutions where as negative people maintain a narrower perspective and tend to focus on problems.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned ... if only to justify itself for making their life a hell.

The more we give away, the richer we become.

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.

The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two numbers together. Is there any harm in skipping all that, in letting the school boy learn multiplication sums, and in starting his more abstract reasoning at a more advanced point. Where would be the harm in letting the boy assume the truth of many propositions of the first four books of Euclid, letting him assume their truth partly by faith, partly by trial?

For those who love dogs, it would be the worst form of a lie to call any place where dogs were banned "Paradise." Certainly no loving God would separate people from their canine friends for eternity.

Language changes only those aspects of our consciousness which are based on information, but not the feelings themselves. The words are as stones that can cause wounds or as caresses that becalm and that guide us, but the content of consciousness is intrinsic.

A good school is a relative concept, and the better schools are located in more expensive neighborhoods. But when everyone bids more for a house in a better school district, they succeed only in bidding up the prices of those houses. As before, 50 percent of all children will attend schools in the bottom half of the school quality distribution. As in the familiar stadium metaphor, all stand, hoping to get a better view, only to discover that no one sees better than if all had remained seated.

The U theory suggests that the central integrating thought ... will emerge from building three integrated capacities: a new capacity for observing that no longer fragments the observer from what's observed; a new capacity for stillness that no longer fragments who we really are from what's emerging; and a new capacity for creating alternative realities that no longer fragments the wisdom of the head, heart and hand.

We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.

We do not have the luxury of despair right now. There is too much at stake, for too many people.

Is there water still on Mars? I don't have a view on that because we don't have good data to answer that question. One of the biggest mistakes you can make if you're a scientist is to think you know the answer, or wish for a certain answer, before you actually have it.

At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus' divinity or Buddhism's Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion.

Most people aren't anywhere near to realizing their creative potential, in part because they're laboring in environments that impede intrinsic motivation.