Academics From The United States

"I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong."

"The only thing I can say about W. C. Fields … is this: Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad."

"Extremists think "communication" means agreeing with them."

"We use more discriminating intelligence when we buy a used car than when we buy a religion. Buying a used car you at least look underneath the hood, hit the tires, maybe take it to a mechanic to check it out. But in buying a religion you're supposed to wear these narrow blinders, so that if anybody disagrees you can block it out. It's basically, check your brains at the door when you join a religion."

"What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles?"

"This is an excellent research report that should, once and for all, resolve senseless controversies about the correlation of creativity with psychopathology."

"Ludwig’s penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace."

"There not only should be far higher percentages of women in power, but they should be well represented at every level: crucial cabinet posts, ambassadorships, and the highest military ranks. I believe that countries then might not be so confrontational."

"Paranoia is naturally common among all kinds of rulers, especially tyrants and visionaries."

"Although humans and baboons may fight among themselves, dominate others, and keep harems, only humans have the ability to give pious excuses for what they do."

"An arresting book that casts political science out the window and explains leadership through comparisons with chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans."

"Useful for physicians who wish to understand alcoholism and the recovery process, and to gain anecdotal evidence of this process, which is presented by using the words of recovering alcoholics....Can be of great value to those many physicians faced with individual patients who are drinking too much."

"An excellent little book — highly informative, full of challenging and stimulating ideas, and teeming with shrewd clinical insights."

"Ludwig offers a unique integrative perspective which encompasses the clinical wisdom accrued through twenty-five years of experience as an alcoholism researcher and therapist....The book serves as an excellent primer for clinicians and recovering persons on a practical and multiperspective approach to alcoholism treatment."

"A thoroughly readable and rich introduction to...the process of recovery from alcoholism."

"An outstanding effort filled with important information for those who treat alcoholics, live with alcoholics, or who are alcoholics.... A significant contribution to the field, and all who deal with alcoholics would benefit from reading it."

"Ludwig also provides a brief, quite brilliant exposition and critique of the concept of an "authentic" self, noting that it is rooted in a male Victorian ethos and that it has been overshadowed by the more contemporary American notion of self-invention. Ludwig's beautifully written and intellectually provocative book is one of those rare works that offer fresh, profound insights, moving the reader to think probingly about his or her own life and self."

"Ludwig's book is outstanding. It pulls together a mound of pertinent data, much of it new, into coherent patterns...Throughout the book the reader is offered a wealth of insights and serious questions...Ludwig's development of a Creative Achievement Scale [is] a valued contribution in its own right, allowing researchers a comprehensive objective tool for scoring subjects' degree of achievement... Ludwig has cleared up much of the confusion and opinionated muddleheadedness... that has been attached to the topic and the thinking regarding a relationship between psychopathology and creativity."

"People may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of which they attribute to being human, but they masticate, fornicate, and procreate, much as chimps and do, so they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate, and administrate, too."

"There was no future and no past. The present was eternity."

"While mental disturbances may provide individuals with an underlying sense of unease that seems necessary for sustained creative activity, these disturbances are not the only source for inner tension... chronic physical ailments may give someone a heightened sense of urgency to leave a mark on the world and achieve immortality through creative greatness."

"Microkernels are not a pipe dream. They represent proven technology."

"If you just want to use the system, instead of hacking on its internals, you don't need source code."

"Will we soon see President Bush coming to Europe with Richard Stallman and Rick Rashid in tow, demanding that Europe import more American free software?"

"While most people can talk rationally about kernel design and portability, the issue of free-ness is 100% emotional."

"Writing a portable OS is not much harder than a nonportable one, and all systems should be written with portability in mind these days."

"A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack."

"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-) […] Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second "F" for this term."

"But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a modern "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that."

"The only real argument for monolithic systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that microkernel systems can be just as fast as monolithic systems."

"LINUX is obsolete."

"I really am not angry with Linus. Honest. He's not angry with me either."

"A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring."

""Linux is a leprosy; …" This statement is not grammatically, politically, or factually correct."

"System designers who do not allow users to type far ahead ought to be tarred and feathered, or worse yet, be forced to use their own system."

"UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate."

""He" should be read as "he or she" throughout the book."

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."

"However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process."

"Many security texts decompose the security of an information system in three components: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Together, they are often referred to as "CIA". [They] constitute the core security properties that we must protect against attackers and eavesdroppers—such as the (other) CIA."

"Fight Features. … The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small."

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

"I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience."

"So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy."

"[I]f American champions of civil liberty could all think in terms of economic freedom as the goal of their labors, they too would accept "workers' democracy" as far superior to what the capitalist world offers to any but a small minority. Yes, and they would accept — regretfully, of course — the necessity of dictatorship while the job of reorganizing society on a socialist basis is being done."

"I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons — the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion."

"When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies at home and abroad. I dislike it in principle as dangerous to its own objects. But the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. They are liberties that most closely affect the lives of the people — power in the trade unions, in peasant organizations, in the cultural life of nationalities, freedom of women in public and private life, and a tremendous development of education for adults and children."

"I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental."

"The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, a traumatic shock to me, ended any ambivalence I had about the Soviet Union, and all cooperation with Communists in united fronts."

"We may disagree with Randi on certain points, but we ignore him at our peril."