Academics From The United States

"A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements."

"If they [students] leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity."

"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."

"The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve."

"In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, race was already a weapon in the struggle between absolutism, aristocracy, and the middle class. The warfare spread to the arts and philosophy in the nineteenth century, by which time independent shoots in other cultures had also borne fruit, leaving the grand harvesting on a world-wide scale to our generation.Viewed in the light of such facts, the race question appears a much bigger affair than a trumped-up excuse for local persecution. It becomes rather a mode of thought endemic in Western civilization. It defaces every type of mental activity — history, art, politics, science and social reform."

"Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word Race has a fair claim to being the most common, the most ambiguous, and the most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are everywhere spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what Race means."

"Throughout the nation's history, the national destiny of the United States has been understood in antimilitaristic, libertarian terms."

"The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind can be re-created on a worldwide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene. … International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim."

"We must distinguish between military and political power. Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former control over certain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of any of these."

"However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political. Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation?" (Or of the federal government, of Congress, of the party, of agriculture, as the case may be.) The political realist is not unaware of the existence and relevance of standards of thought other than political ones. As political realist, he cannot but subordinate these other standards to those of politics."

"Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also."

"Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival."

"Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the requirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the political issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is."

"Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure. Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion — between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking."

"Influence can persuade, but power can compel."

"When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large."

"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn't place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

"“Remember what the mob chanted as they stormed the Capitol and injured our officers? ‘Hang Mike Pence!' Someone should have told Donald Trump that the president’s job under Article II of the Constitution is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not that the vice president is executed!”"

"Senators! This trial is not about Donald Trump, the country and the world know who Donald Trump is! This trial is about who we are... who we are"

"If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic."

"I survive almost any onslaught with a shrug, which must appear as arrogance, but really isn't because I'm not an arrogant person. When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions — that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that it's worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. That's all. And then you go about your business, assuming you'd be the first to know if your talent has collapsed. I don't think I've been a commercial playwright ever. By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing — which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring. I very seldom get it anyway, and then it's accidental when I do. … So I write those things that interest me."

"I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing — and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga — it will all equal itself out... You can't involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response. I'm fairly confident that my work is going to be around for a while. I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do."

"I've noticed that there is not necessarily a great relationship between what the majority of critics have to say and what is actually true. Some of them are so busy trying to mold the public taste according to the limits of their perceptions, and others are so busy reflecting what they consider to be the public taste — that view limited again by their perception. You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid — but most people don't take the trouble."

"Q: Do you find quite a difference between the audience at large and the critics as a group? A: Well, one is a group of human beings, one is not."

"American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties."

"Primarily the characters must seem interested in what they, themselves, are doing and saying. While the lines must not read metronome-exact, I feel that a certain set rhythm will come about, quite of itself. No one rushes in on the end of anyone else's speech; no one waits too long. I have indicated, quite precisely, within the speeches of the Long-Winded Lady, by means of commas, periods, semi-colons, colons, dashes and dots (as well as parenthetical stage directions) the speech rhythms. Please observe them carefully, for they were not thrown in, like herbs on a salad, to be mixed about. I have underlined words I want stressed. I have capitalized for loudness, and used exclamation points for emphasis. There are one or two seeming questions that I have left the question mark off of. This was done o purpose, as an out-loud reading will make self-evident."

"What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement."

"Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, [but] every character is an extension of the author's own personality."

"A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth."

"Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite."

"I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say — it leaves me something to do."

"One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand."

"You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are."

"I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour."

"What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy."

"Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly."

"I was very fortunate to know the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar during his last years. Chandra, as we called him, was the first to discover that general relativity implied that stars above a certain mass would collapse into what we now call a black hole. Much later, he wrote a beautiful book describing the different solutions of the equations of general relativity that describe black holes. As I got to know him, Chandra shocked me by speaking of a deep anger toward Einstein. Chandra was upset that Einstein, after inventing general relativity, had abandoned this masterpiece, leaving it to others to struggle through it."

"The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time. And since the general theory of Relativity provides only a single unique family of solutions for their descriptions, they are the simplest objects as well."

"All the standard equations of mathematical physics can be separated and solved in ."

"It is, indeed an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature.… What is intelligible is also beautiful."

"You need great precision in the way the words are delivered, and in the way the emotions are understood. If you start leaving out words or putting them in or coming in on the wrong bit it spoils it. But Albee understands that when you are playing a play it's very important that it's naturalistic on the surface. That it is like jazz. If the actors are playing well together, you have the structure, you have the beats, but you maybe play it a bit differently every night."

"I remember two playwrights who affected me deeply, for their wit especially: Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett. I found their sense of absurdity comforting."

"It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep."

"The gods too are fond of a joke."

"The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself."

"Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve."

"Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage."

"I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like."

"It is incidental to, and is implied in the several acts by which these institutions are created, and is secured to the individuals employed in them, by the judicial power alone; that is, the judicial power is the instrument employed by the government in administering this security. That department has no will, in any case. If the sound construction of the act be, that it exempts the trade of the Bank, as being essential to the character of a machine necessary to the fiscal operations of the government, from the control of the States, Courts are as much bound to give it that construction, as if the exemption had been established in express terms. Judicial power, as contradistinguished from the power of the laws, has no existence. Courts are the mere instruments of the law, and can will nothing. When they are said to exercise a discretion, it is a mere legal discretion, a discretion to be exercised in discerning the course prescribed by law; and, when that is discerned, it is the duty of the Court to follow it. Judicial power is never exercised for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Judge; always for the purpose of giving effect to the will of the Legislature; or, in other words, to the will of the law."

"This practice of Judge Marshall, of travelling out of his case to prescribe what the law would be in a most case not before the court, is very irregular and very censurable."