144 quotes found
"We have to beef up our searches, which are now pretty dismal, so we can find out about these things before we get hit. … It takes a dramatic event to get people's attention, and we thought the comet crash with Jupiter might have done the job. … we tend to ignore an extraterrestrial hazard that could reduce the planet to rubble. … What we really need is a good scare."
"What delighted me was that it's 30 years from now — not next week or next year. … That would be totally hopeless; that would be terrifying, in fact. Time is on our side in this one — that's why it's such a wonderful illustration of the process... I say 30 years is a good long time to do something about it if it is a problem … We should be thankful we have this kind of notice."
"It is probably a good idea to search, at some level, for asteroids that come to the Earth's general vicinity. But merely counting the asteroids found is not sufficient. It is desirable to follow up each discovery to examine whether it can or can not be a threat during the next century or so. Objects for which the threat cannot be eliminated should be singled out for special study, notably to the extent of searching for old images in photographic archives. 1997 XF11 was noteworthy for the apathy shown to it prior to the very widespead announcement in March. If proper attention had been given to it earlier, the circumstances that led to the announcement would never have occurred. Sometimes statistics will conspire to draw attention to a problem. Maybe they are trying to tell us something."
"When the Deep Impact probe hit Comet 9P/Tempel, there was almost no change in brightness. … This outburst by Comet Holmes is extreme!"
"This is a terrific outburst. And since it doesn’t have a tail right now, some observers have confused it with a nova. We’ve had at least two reports of a new star."
"Getting up any cliff is like a physics problem -- you just got to hold on, try everything, and stick with it."
"In rose with petals soft as air I bind for you the tides and fire — the death that lives within the flower, oh, gladly love, for you I bear."
"Intent on one great love, perfect, Requited and for ever, I missed love's everywhere Small presence, thousand-guised."
"Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen Or the golden-haired sons of kings, Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves, Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail"
"He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water Whose ripples spread from the heart of the sea, He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter Broadcast on the swift river."
"Let's not allow mental illness to be further stigmatized by events like the Newtown tragedy, nor to distract us from the solutions that are closer at hand. It's a lot faster, easier, and cheaper to reduce the number of assault weapons in circulation than it is to identify, treat and contain the very small subgroup of people with mental illness who present a homicide risk. We need to do both, of course, but gun safety will make the difference sooner."
"It is worthy of notice that in Table VI the brighter variables have the longer periods. It is also noticeable that those having the longest periods appear to be as regular in their variations as those which pass through their changes in a day or two."
"The discovery of variable stars, at this Observatory and elsewhere, has progressed so rapidly during the last five years, that the difficulty of keeping pace in observing and discussing them has become very great. In the study of distribution now in progress here, the actual time devoted to the search for new variables is small, but thorough observation requires much time, while the discussion of results may be prolonged almost indefinitely. When new lists of variables are published, therefore, it should be remembered that their discovery does not interfere materially with the study of individual objects. The number of these is so large that the publication of full results for all must be greatly delayed."
"Apparently no sharp dividing line can be drawn between true Algol stars and those whose variations are continuous. Periods of nine variables in this region, which are of the Algol type or closely resemble it, have been determined and are here discussed."
"The range of H 1255 is only four tenths of a magnitude, and on account of its brightness it is difficult to observe on all plates except those taken with the 1-inch Cooke lens. It seemed necessary, therefore, to take unusual precautions in order to secure accurate observations, and to give each one its full weight. Accordingly, one hundred and thirty six photographs were selected, including nearly all of those taken with the Cooke lens, and also those taken with the 8 inch Bache Telescope on which the variable was certainly faint. Four independent estimates of brightness were made on each plate, and means were taken, thus reducing the probable error one half. The phase was computed for each observation, thus covering all parts of the light curve. ...H 1255 and H 1303 differ from the other variables in a marked degree as in each case the duration of the phase of minimum is very long in proportion to the length of the period. This fact led to considerable difficulty in determining their periods as they were apparently at their minimum brightness for some time before and after the actual minima occurred. In H 1255, the change in brightness is obviously continuous throughout the period, although it is much more rapid near minimum than near maximum. This is clearly seen in Plate IV, Figs. 5 and 6."
"A remarkable relation between the brightness of these Cepheid] variables and the length of their periods will be noticed. In H.A. 60, No.4, attention was called to the fact that the brighter variables have the longer periods, but at that time it was felt that the number was too small the drawing of general conclusions. The periods of 8 additional variables which have been determined since that time, however, conform to the same law. The relation is shown graphically in Figure 1... The two resulting curves, one for the maxima and one for the minima, are surprisingly smooth, and of remarkable form. In Figure 2, the abscissas are equal to the logarithms of the periods, and the ordinates to the corresponding magnitudes, as in Figure 1. A straight line can readily be drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to the maxima and minima, thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variables and their periods. The logarithm of the period increases by about 0.48 for each increase of one magnitude in brightness."
"Since the Cepheid] variables are probably at nearly the same distance from the Earth, their periods are apparently associated with their actual emission of light, as determined by their mass, density, and surface brightness."
"It is to be hoped, also, that the parallaxes of some variables of this type may be measured."
"It is hoped that systematic study of the light changes of all the variables, nearly two thousand in number, in the two Magellanic Clouds may soon be undertaken at this Observatory."
"A determination of the visual magnitudes of the stars had a very large place in the work of the Observatory during the first half of Professor Pickering's directorate. As soon as the need of photographic magnitudes became urgent, the importance of a standard sequence, from which the photographic magnitudes could be derived for stars anywhere in the sky, became evident. A sequence of stars of varying magnitudes had been early selected near the North Pole, and the determination of the magnitudes of the stars involved was assigned to Miss Leavitt. This work was carried out with unusual originality, skill, and patience."
"About 1906 a Durchmustering of variable stars was proposed at the Harvard Observatory. Somewhat later this was undertaken on plates included in the Map of the Sky... A comparison of the photographs of a number of these regions by Miss Leavitt led to the discovery of several hundred variables and other special objects. Among them were a number of stars of the Algol type."
"One of the most striking accomplishments of Miss Leavitt was the discovery of 1,777 variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds. These results were [made] possible by photographs of long exposure made at Arequipa with the 24-inch Bruce refractor and forwarded to Cambridge. Some of these plates had exposures of from two to four hours and showed very faint stars, among which nearly all the variables are found. ...from a study of 25 of them, the important law was derived, that the length of period bears a definite relation to the absolute magnitude."
"In addition to these larger labors, Miss Leavitt took part in various minor investigations. She gave considerable time to the discovery of new celestial objects. Altogether, she found 4 new stars, 2400 variable stars, or about one half of the known variables, and various asteroids and other objects."
"Miss Leavitt was of an especially quiet and retiring nature, and absorbed in her work to an unusual degree. She had the highest esteem of all her associates at the Harvard Observatory, where her loss is keenly felt."
"Apart from her few and very important scientific papers, Leavitt left behind almost no traces of her life. She was born on the Fourth of July 1868 in Lancaster, Mass., and died of cancer on Dec. 12, 1921. Her will tells nearly all. She left an estate worth $314.91, mostly in Liberty Bonds, with a few items such as a desk valued at $5. She never married and had few living relatives. She also left behind a legacy of a great astronomical discovery."
"Hubble tackled two of the most fundamental questions of the universe: how old is it, and how big? To answer both it is necessary to know two things—how far away certain galaxies are and how fast they are flying away from us. The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with. For that you need what are known as "standard candles"—stars whose brightness can be reliably calculated and used as benchmarks... Hubble's luck was to come along soon after an ingenious woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt had figured out a way to do so."
"As a senior in 1892 Leavitt was introduced to astronomy. She was fascinated by it, and after graduation she enrolled in a course to study the subject full time. Tragically Henrietta Leavitt was suddenly struck down by a serous illness, and she was forced to spend over two years at home recovering. Her illness left her profoundly deaf. ...when she felt fit enough she put forward her name in 1895 as a volunteer worker at Harvard College Observatory."
"The photographic plates from Peru that Leavitt was studying in Harvard covered two clouds of stars, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds... During the course of her painstaking work, Leavitt noticed that the Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) showed an overall pattern of behaviour in which the brighter Cepheids... went through their cycle more slowly. The initial discovery was reported in 1908, and by 1912 Leavitt had enough data to pin down this period-luminosity relationship in a mathematical formula, established from her study of twenty-five Cepheids in the SMC. ...Leavitt found a clear mathematical relationship between the apparent brightness of a Cepheid in the SMC and its period... This could only mean that the absolute magnitudes of Cepheids are related to one another in the same way, since the distance effect is essentially the same for all of the Cepheids in the SMC. All that was needed now was to find the distance to just one or two Cepheids in our neighborhood... so that distances... could be worked out from the period-luminosity law that Leavitt had discovered."
"She and others realized that one needed only to calculate the distance to these [Magellanic] Cepheids, which almost certainly were roughly the same distance to the earth, to have a useful yardstick for measuring other distances."
"She deserved the Nobel Prize for her work."
"He acknowledges the use and calibration of her period-luminosity relation first by Hertzsprung and later by Shapley and ends the “Period- Luminosity Relations to Cepheids” section in his book without ever mentioning that he, Hubble, had used Shapley’s technique. ...Hubble’s underwhelming acknowledgment of Henrietta Leavitt is an example of the ongoing denial and lack of the professional and public recognition that Henrietta Leavitt suffers from, despite her landmark discovery. With the exception of naming a moon crater after her, the profession of astronomy has not done much to celebrate her work. No astronomy prize is named after her and the period-luminosity relation has not been renamed as the H. Leavitt law."
"I should be willing to pay thirty cents an hour in view of the quality of your work, although our usual price, in such cases, is twenty five cents an hour."
"The following statement regarding the periods of 25 variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud has been prepared by Miss Leavitt."
"By the death of Miss Leavitt on December 12, 1921, the Observatory lost an investigator of the highest value. She had obtained a comprehensive experience in photographic photometry, and had developed a clear appreciation of the difficulties involved in the theory and practice of this important research. Her work on standard magnitude sequences was nearly concluded at the time of her death, but she had hardly begun work on her extensive program of photographic measures of variable stars. In the foregoing summary no mention has been made of Miss Leavitt's work on standard photometry..."
"How far are the spiral nebulae? How large is the universe? We cannot begin to answer these questions unless we measure the distance of heavenly objects. The breakthrough was made by Henrietta Leavitt, who was interested in a rather special class of stars, the Cepheids. The intensity of light coming from Cepheids rises and falls regularly with time... Concentrating on one of the Magellanic Clouds, she found that there was a very close relationship... The brighter the Cepheid was, the longer its period. The distance of the Magellanic Cloud is so great that the stars there can be regarded as all being effectively the same distance from the Earth. If you are in Los Angeles, everybody in Carnegie Hall is about the same distance from you. ...Suppose that a Cepheid in the cloud has a certain brightness and a period of one week. Now look at another Cepheid in some more distant galaxy. If it has the same period, we can assume it has the same intrinsic brightness, and yet it is dimmer than it should be. ...we can work out the relative distance from Earth. A star of the same intrinsic brightness that is twice as far away will be four times dimmer. ...It is slightly complicated by the effects on brightness of interstellar dust clouds, but it was a huge step forward."
"Miss Henrietta Swan Leavitt, for more than twenty years a member of the staff of the Harvard Astronomical Observatory, died at her home in Cambridge on Dec. 12. She was a graduate of Radcliffe College, and had studied astronomy as a graduate student. She joined the staff of the Harvard Observatory in 1895, and finally was in charge of the department of photographic stellar photometry. She determined the brightness of a series of stars near the north pole ranging from the fourth to the twentieth magnitude; discovered four new stars and 2,400 variables of about half of all the known variable stars; formulated a law establishing a definite relation between the brightness and the length of period of such variables; and made other noteworthy achievements in astronomy. The scientific results of her work form parts of volumes 60, 71, 84, and 85 in the "Annals of the Harvard Observatory.""
"To the Editor of the Bulletin: In Professor Hart's most interesting and illuminating article printed in the Alumni Bulletin he remarks that barring certain exceptions "petticoats are considered to have no place in Harvard or a Harvard Catalogue." Unfortunately this statement is only too true, and I believe the time is ripe to take serious account of the important and indispensable services that women are rendering to the University in technical and administrative positions in her offices and her institutions. We have recently read in the papers of the death of Miss Henrietta S. Leavitt of the Astronomical Observatory, whose work in photographic photometry gave her an international reputation... in fact, the services that the women have rendered at the Observatory are too well known in the scientific world to need further comment. ...Harvard should follow the lead already taken by the other large universities of the country, including California, Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale, in recognizing high grade service afforded by women on its staff, and this recognition should be not merely the inclusion of their names in the Catalogue... but should carry with it privileges of retirement and pension funds and of leave of absence at stated periods in order to afford opportunity for study and research. Several of the universities named are already ahead of Harvard in this respect, and in some of them women occupying high grade technical positions take rank with instructors and assistant professors when their acquirements and the nature of their work make them worthy of it. ...my heading "Petticoats in Harvard" is not an attempt to bring up the question is... only a plea for fitting recognition of scholarly work efficiently and faithfully performed in our midst by an unrecognized body of experts."
"When credit is expanding, the rising price level and high profits bring about a high rate of interest. When the expansion has reached, the limit permitted by the stock of gold, the rate of interest is put still higher in order to bring about a fall in the price level. When the fall in prices takes effect, a low rate of interest becomes appropriate, and when credit contraction has proceeded so far that a redundant supply of gold has accumulated, the rate of interest is depressed still lower in order to bring about a renewed rise in the price level. Thus a high rate of interest corresponds first with rising, then with falling, prices, and so synchronizes with high prices. A low rate of interest corresponds first with falling, and then with rising, prices, and so synchronizes with low prices."
"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing."
"Scientific treatment of the subject of currency is impossible without some form of the quantity theory … but the quantity theory by itself is inadequate, and it leads up to the method of treatment based on what I have called the consumers’ income and the consumers’ outlay – that is to say, simply the aggregates of individual incomes and individual expenditures."
"The total effective demand for commodities in the market is limited to the number of units of money of account that dealers are prepared to offer, and the number they are prepared to offer over any period of time is limited according to the number they hope to receive."
"The use of money does not disestablish the normal process of creating credit. Money, it is true, is always being paid into the banks by the retailers and others who receive it in the course of business, and they of course receive bank credits in return for the money thus deposited. But for the manufacturers and others who have to pay money out, credits are still created by the exchange of obligations, the banker's immediate obligation being given to his customer in exchange for the customer's obligation to repay at a future date. We shall still describe this dual operation as the creation of credit. By its means the banker creates the means of payment out of nothing, whereas when he receives a bag of money from his customer, one means of payment, a bank credit, is merely substituted for another, an equal amount of cash."
"Indeed it would have been a mean-spirited course to go back on the century-old standard on account of so trifling a premium on gold, a premium which, as it turned out, the action of the market wiped out in a few months, before any of the provisions of the Act of 1819 had come into operation."
"Man is a rational animal, and if human affairs are hard to regulate, his twofold nature is usually the cause. Reason is something ultimate; it would be the same in another planet, or in another universe, as it is here. Animal nature is something contingent; it might have been different. Our life is a compromise, a blend between the animal and the rational."
"If each member of society can be induced or impelled to do his allotted task by associating it with some motive that appears to him adequate, then he need never know how he is contributing to the real end, and need not even be aware of the end at all. It is this problem of organization that we shall call the Economic Problem. It is in fact the real subject matter of political economy."
"Economic theory, in every branch, deals with practical affairs. Its subject is human welfare, and it is never entirely dissociated from the practical question of how human welfare is to be promoted. But it is a special characteristic of the art of central banking that it deals specifically with the task of an authority directly entrusted with the promotion of human welfare. Human welfare, human motives, human behaviour supply material so baffling and elusive that many people are sceptical of the possibility of building a scientific edifice on so shifting a foundation. But however complex the material, and however imperfect the data, there is always an advantage to be gained from systematic thought."
"To unstable money are to be traced nearly all our economic troubles since 1918: the unemployment of the inter-war period; the over-employment and scarcity of labour since the Second World War; the labour unrest incidental to perpetual wage demands; the hardships and dislocation caused by the declining value of small savings, annuities and endowments; the vexation of continual price rises even for those whose incomes on the whole keep pace with them; the collapse of the prices of Government securities through distrust of the unit in which they are valued."
"Once the gold standard was suspended, there could be no doubt of the purpose of that step. In face of the exchange risk the high rate could not possibly attract foreign money. It could only be intended as a safeguard against inflation. Fantastic fears of inflation were expressed. That was to cry, Fire, Fire, in Noah's Flood. It is after depression and unemployment have subsided that inflation becomes dangerous."
"Hawtrey, I think one can see, came to favor the other way out. It is the fixed rate of exchange which imposes the international constraint; if that is abandoned, the Bank can recover its authority. A system in which the rate of exchange is free to move, while internal stability is maintained by a relentless application of the Bank Rate mechanism, is theoretically conceivable, and as a model is instructive. But it would seem to depend for its working upon the maintenance of confidence in some normal rate of exchange, from which the current rate would be supposed to diverge only more or less temporarily; and it is not easy to see how such confidence could be engendered."
"I regard Mr. Hawtrey as my grandparent and Mr. Robertson as my parent in the paths of errancy, and I have been greatly influenced by them."
"We were at an age when our beliefs influenced our behaviour, a characteristic of the young which it is easy for the middle-aged to forget, and the habits of feeling formed then still persist in a recognisable degree. It is those habits of feeling, influencing the majority of us, which make this Club a collectivity and separate us from the rest. They overlaid, somehow, our otherwise extremely diiferent characters-—Moore himself was a puritan and precisian, Strachey (for that was his name at that time) a Voltaircan, Woolf a rabbi, myself a nonconformist, Sheppard a conformist and (as it now turns out) an ecclesiastic, Clive a gay and amiable dog, Sydney-Turner a quietist, Hawtrey a dogmatist and so on."
"If thoughtful individuals, well read in contemporary economic theory in the 1920s, had been asked at that time which economist was most likely to revolutionise twentieth-century monetary economics (and indeed had already started doing so), it is likely that, without hesitation, they would have given the name Ralph Hawtrey, rather than that of his rival, which we would now give, John Maynard Keynes."
"Mehrling: So you didn’t read at that time the classic banking texts, for example, Bagehot’s Lombard Street? Volcker: Well I read some of Bagehot, and I read a lot of Hawtrey. I remember I read a lot of Hawtrey. Mehrling: Currency and Credit? The Art of Central Banking? Volcker: I don’t remember the names of the books, just being in London. In those days I used to read The Economist and the Financial Times, so I kept up with what was going on in the money markets."
"The means determine the goal. If lies and violence are the means, the results cannot be good.... We have been in Palestine for twelve years [i.e. since the 1917 without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people.... I believe that it will be possible for us to hold Palestine and continue to grow for a long time. This will be done first with British aid and then later with the help of our own bayonets -- shamefully called Haganah [defense] -- clearly because we have no faith in our own policy. But by that time we will not be able to do without the bayonets. The means will have determined the goal. Jewish Palestine will no longer have anything of that Zion for which I once put myself on the line."
"Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare."
"I began studying philosophy and economics about the same time. The similarity of the two disciplines struck me at once. I found no difficulty in grasping the differences between the great philosophical systems as they were presented by our textbooks and our teachers. Economic theory was easier still. Indeed, I thought the successive systems of economics were rather crude affairs compared with the subtleties of the metaphysicians. Having run the gamut from Plato to T. H. Green (as undergraduates do) I felt the gamut from Quesnay to Marshall was a minor theme. The technical part of the theory was easy. Give me premises and I could spin speculations by the yard. Also I knew that my 'deductions' were futile..."
"In physical science and in industrial technique... we have emancipated ourselves... from the savage dependence upon catastrophes for progress... In science and in industry we are radicals—radicals relying on a tested method. But in matters of social organization we retain a large part of the conservatism characteristic of the savage mind..."
"This book offers an analytic description of the complicated processes by which seasons of business prosperity, crisis, depression, and revival come about in the modern world. The materials used consist chiefly of market reports and statistics concerning the business cycles which have run their course since 1890 in the United States, England, Germany and France."
"One seeking to understand the recurrent ebb and flow of economic activity characteristic of the present day finds these numerous explanations both suggestive and perplexing. All are plausible, but which is valid? None necessarily excludes all the others, but which is the most important? Each may account for certain phenomena ; does any one account for all the phenomena ? Or can these rival explanations be combined in such a fashion as to make a consistent theory which is wholly adequate?"
"Although in various other academic fields and area studies, such as race science, postcolonial scholarship has completely deconstructed and exposed the colonial investment in the propagation of certain theories, the field of Indology, at least in present-day Western academic circles, has been very suspicious of these voices being raised against the theory of the Aryan invasions."
"One must beware of falling into a kind of uncritical Indological McCarthyism towards those open to reconsidering the established contours of ancient Indian history, irrespective of their motives and backgrounds, and of lumping all challenges into a simplistic, convenient and easily-demonized 'Hindu Nationalist' category."
"One can, of course, understand the concern over the extremes of Hindu nationalism given Europe’s own bitter history of Aryanism, although the fact is that much of the impetus fueling the ‘revisionism’ of the Indo-Aryan issue stems from distrust of the motives and agendas underpinning the entire construction and pursuit of the Indo-European homeland quest by Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries in the first place. Anyone who has at all dabbled with the history of this enterprise, rooted as it is in European racisms, nationalisms and quests for biblical origins, can hardly blame such a priori suspicion in the post-colonial climate of Indian historiography. ‘After all, much of the scholarship on the history of the Indian subcontinent was formulated during the colonial and imperial heyday of the 19th century. We thus have a complex situation where, on the one hand, there are valid and serious grounds for concern over nationalistic appropriation of myths of origin in present day India, and, on the other, equally valid grounds for submitting the entire Indo-European/Indo-Aryan locating enterprise to post-colonial scrutiny."
"I agree that a plausible explanation has yet to be given as to how, if there were indeed no actual invasion of Indo-Aryans but only the migratory ‘trickle’ into which it has been reconfigured, the newcomers could have completely eradicated the pre-existing language of the entire North of the subcontinent in the short interval normally allotted between their arrival and the composition of the Rgveda, in which the local topography is Indo-Aryan. When one considers that, in these proposed two or three centuries, such hypothetical migrants managed even to Sanskritize practically all of the names of rivers and places, the most conservative aspect of a substratum, in the N.W. of the subcontinent, but yet failed to do so in the East of the subcontinent despite Aryanizing it for well over two millennia, and the accomplishment is remarkable (and, of course, they failed to even displace the Dravidian languages in the South despite extensive interaction for almost as long). Add to this that their predecessors were the highly sophisticated and urbanized residents of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the incoming Indo-Aryans typically construed as pastoralist nomads, and Kazanas has a right to wonder how and why would the Indus Valley dwellers have so thoroughly and completely adopted the language of these illiterate herdsmen if the latter were not invaders — a status denied them by archaeology?"
"Unfortunately, the whole Indigenous Aryan position is often simplistically stereotyped, and conveniently demonized, both in India and in the West, as a discourse exclusively determined by such agendas. This bypasses other concerns also motivating such reconsideration of history: the desire of many Indian scholars to reclaim control over the reconstruction of the religious and cultural history of their country from the legacy of imperial and colonial scholarship. In chapter 131 discuss the manifold concerns that I perceive as motivating Indigenous Aryanists to undertake a reconsideration of this issue. I argue that although there are doubtlessly nationalistic and, in some quarters, communal agendas lurking behind some of this scholarship, a principal feature is anticolonial/imperial."
"On the other hand, and again on a personal note, I am also concerned at what I perceive to be a type of Indological McCarthyism creeping into areas of Western, as well as certain Indian, academic circles, whereby, as will be discussed in chapter 13, anyone reconsidering the status quo of Indo-Aryan origins is instantly and a priori dubbed a nationalist, a communalist, or, even worse, a Nazi."
"Perhaps this is an opportune moment to reveal my own present position on the Indo- European problem. I am one of a long list of people who do not believe that the avail- able data are sufficient to establish anything very conclusive about an Indo-European homeland, culture, or people. I am comfortable with the assumptions that cognate languages evolve from a reasonably standardized protoform (provided this is allowed con- siderable dialectal variation) that was spoken during a certain period of human history and culture in a somewhat condensed geographic area that is probably somewhere in the historically known Indo-European-speaking area (although I know of no solid grounds for excluding the possibility that this protolanguage could have originated outside of this area)."
"However, regarding homelands, I differ from most Western scholars in that I find myself hard pressed to absolutely eliminate the possibility that the eastern part of this region could be one possible candidate among several, albeit not a particularly convincing one, provided this area is delimited by Southeast Central Asia, Afghanistan, present- day Pakistan, and the northwest of the subcontinent (rather than the Indian subcontinent proper). I hasten to stress that it is not that the evidence favors this area as a possible homeland—on the contrary, there has been almost no convincing evidence brought for- ward in support of a homeland this far east. As we shall see, the issue is that problems arise when one tries to prove that the Indo-Aryans were intrusive into this area from an outside homeland. In other words, one has almost no grounds to argue for a South Asian Indo-European homeland from where the other speakers of the Indo-European language departed, but one can argue that much of the evidence brought forward to document tlieir entrance into the subcontinent is problematic. These are two separate, but obviously overlapping, issues."
"Coupled with the problems that have been raised against all homeland candidates, these issues have caused me conclude that, in the absence of radically new evidence or approaches to the presently available evidence, theories on the homeland of the Indo- European speaking peoples will never be convincingly proven to the satisfaction of even a majority of scholars."
"After these elements have been adequately processed and acknowledged, we can move forward, hopefully somewhat free from the ghosts of the past, to reexamine the actual evidence from the perspectives of our own present-day postcolonial academic culture."
"Suspicion of the theory based on scriptural testimony—or lack thereof—remains an explicit or implicit factor in much Indigenous Aryan discourse."
"The Rgvedic texts were read in the political context of nineteenth-century philology, which has been outlined in chapter 1. This certainly influenced the choice of possible inter- pretations placed on such words as andsa and on the battles of the Aryas and the Dasas. The racial interpretations extrapolated from the texts to support an Aryan migration have been justly challenged by both Indian and, albeit after the lag of a century, Western scholars. Their place in serious discussions of the Indo-Aryan problem is highly questionnable."
"There is ample evidence of foreign personages and tribes in the Vedic period. Kuiper lists some twenty-six names of Vedic individuals who have non-Indo-Aryan names, with which Mayrhofer concurs. Witzel points out that twenty-two out of fifty Rgvedic tribal names are not Indo-Aryan, with a majority of them occurring in later books."
"Many of die foreign terms for flora and fauna could simply indicate that these items have continually been imported into the subcontinent over the centuries, as continues to be the case today. The exception to this is place-names and river names, but the absence of foreign terms for the topography and hydronomy of the Northwest deprives us of significant evidence that has been used to establish substrata elsewhere."
"This raises the immediate objection that if archaeology cannot trace any consistent material culture identifiable as Indo-Aryan arriving into the subcontinent from outside, it most certainly cannot identify any such culture emanating out. Accordingly, as far as archaeology is concerned, we have reached a stalemate (although from a Migrationist perspective there is, arguably at least, some kind of chronological sequence of archaeological culture that at least heads toward the general direction of the subcontinent, even if it does not penetrate it). Ultimately, however, the Aryans cannot be satisfactorily identified in the archaeological record as either entering or exiting. The trajectory of the Indo-Aryans, indeed the necessity of their very existence, is a linguistic issue that archaeology, as most archaeologists are well aware, cannot locate in the archaeological record without engaging in what, to all intents and purposes, amounts to special and often complicated pleading. On the basis of the present evidence, linguistics cannot decisively determine with any significant degree of consensus where the original home- land actually was. And archaeology can only hope to be productive in identifying the material remains of a linguistic group if linguistics has already done the groundwork of pinpointing its geographic area of origin with a reasonable degree of precision."
"Accordingly, archaeology cannot deny the possibility that Indo-Aryan and Iranian (which were preceded by Indo-Iranian) languages might have been spoken in the area of the Punjab, Pakistan/Afghanistan, southeast central Asia/northeast Iran since the second, third or even fourth millennium B.C.E. The problem is chronological. In fact, archaeologically at least, South Asian archaeologists often draw attention to a cultural continuum that can be traced as far back as Mehrgarh in the seventh millennium B.C.E. within which innovations and developments can be explained simply by internal developments and external trade. If there were no constraints stemming from the date commonly assigned to the Veda, this whole area could have included urbanites and agriculturists from the South, as well as nomads and pastoralists from the North, interacting together in the millennia B.C.E. as they always have been and still do in the present day. Both steppe dwellers and urban farmers could have been speakers of related Indo-Iranian dialects in protohistory just as they are today and have always been in recorded history. There could have been invasions, migrations, trade, cultural exchanges, all manner of interactions—cultural evolution and devolution (followed sometimes by renewed evolution)—as well as all manner of diversification in chronological time. And all within a large, heterogeneous ethnic and cultural area of people who nonetheless spoke related dialects—whether living in towns, mountains, or agricultural plains—just as has always been die history of the subcontinent."
"In my view, the references connected with the fourth millennium B.C.E. date, although intriguing, are too speculative to be used as substantial evidence. In the post- 2500 B.C.E. period, however, the quality and quantity of references supporting the position of the sun in Krttika at the vernal equinox are more substantive. They should be given due consideration as a serious possibility. They are as valid a chronological indicator as anything else that has been brought forward to date the Vedic texts. But they cannot win the day in and of themselves without additional, outside support."
"But attention must also be given to the possibility that, in addition to the Indigenist discourses of the nationalists, there might be many other scholars who sincerely believe that the Aryan invasion theory is a seriously flawed historical construct produced by biased imperial powers with overt agendas of their own—in other words, that it was, and is, perceived as "bad history." Consideration must also be given to the perception of many Indian scholars that Europeans might have constructed the idea of an external home of the Aryans to "pander to a false sense of national pride" of their own. No doubt voices challenging the theory of Aryan invasions were, and are, often co- opted and even, in certain cases, initiated and sponsored by nationalist and communal elements, but a wide range of motives have inspired Indian scholars to challenge the idea of Aryan invasions or migrations. Not all historical "revisionism," by which I in- tend the literal meaning of the word in the sense of "reexamination," is necessarily nationalist nor, most certainly, communal a priori. Perhaps the use of the term ^revisionism would illustrate the point: let us not forget that it was Europeans who originally "re- vised" India's Brahmanical notions of history and then imposed their version of events on their subjects. While I do not intend to minimize or gloss over the importance of this issue to Hindu nationalism, my reading of the Indigenous Aryan school is that its concerns are also to a great extent anti-imperial and anticolonial: it is determined to review the revision. Not all who share this concern are necessarily also impelled to find reason to consider themselves the original inhabitants of India so as to enhance their social legitimacy vis-a-vis other communities on the subcontinent."
"However, in such generalizations, distinctions are often not made between communal revisionism and postcolonial reconsideration, and a kind of uncritical McCarthyism has developed in some quarters toward those who favor the Indigenous Aryan point of view, despite the fact that this view is on the ascendancy in India (or, perhaps, as a consequence of it) irrespective of the motives and backgrounds of those interested in this issue."
"The bitterness, antipathy, and sarcasm seeping from the pens of participants in this debate (from both sides of the fence) when referring (increasingly by name) to those holding opposing views is apparent for all to see"
"In a progressive academic context, differences of opinions, however radical, challenge scholars to constantly reexamine their views, assumptions, and methods. This is the lifeline of healthy scholarship. But in the present academic climate in the subcontinent, it has become increasingly difficult, particularly for Indian scholars, to discuss the pre- history of the subcontinent in a rational, objective way without becoming associated with the ideologies that are immediately correlated with pro- or contra- stances for or against the Indigenous Aryan issue. This works to the obvious detriment of expanding and developing a nuanced understanding of the early history of the subcontinent."
"Casting off the legacies of colonialism opens up exciting new possibilities for the understanding of Indian protohistory, provided the constraints of the colonial period are not replaced with an equally constraining insistence on a different ideologically driven reading of the historical evidence, whatever that ideology might be."
"Since there is a tendency to stereotype any local reconsiderations of ancient Indian history whatsoever as nationalist or communal, the purpose of this chapter is to suggest that a wide variety of motives inspire Indian scholars to revisit the topic of Indo-Aryan origins: it is erroneous to lump them all into a simplistic, hastily identified and easily demonized Hindutva category."
"One must be cautious about contributing to a sort of Indological McCarthyism whereby anyone reconsidering or challenging long- held assumptions pertaining to the Indo-Aryans is instantly dubbed a fundamentalist or nationalist or, more drastically, is accused of contributing to Nazi agendas. There is a tendency in Western, and in elements of Indian, academic circles to a priori stereo- type everyone reconsidering this aspect of Indian history in such ways"
"Scholars such as Renfrew and Gamkrelidze and Ivanov can radically challenge established Indo-European homeland theories in the West, but the academic culture in India has developed to the point that anyone attempting to even question established paradigms in early South Asian history is in danger of being dubbed a Nazi. Such a culture has been created as much by remarks made in a generic fashion by some of the opponents of the Indigenous Aryan school as by the bigoted statements of certain Hindu nationalist "Indigenists." It is obviously unconducive to the pursuit of impartial scholarly research that is making at least some effort to be objective."
"This all goes to show that ideological analysis, while indispensable in a historiographical study such as this, must refrain from straitjacketing individuals into convenient and easily identified stereotypes or groupings."
"This raises another dimension that the Indigenous Aryan critique forces us to confront: What constitutes authority in areas of knowledge, particularly where the evidence is sometimes as malleable, scanty, and inconclusive as much of that concerning the Indo-Aryans?"
"Philology and linguistics can actually offer surprisingly little to compel disenchanted Indian scholars to modify their suspicions of the ability of these disciplines to make authoritative pronouncements on the origins of the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples in prehistory."
"It was the testimony of the Bible that originally led scholars to propose the existence of a linguistically unified group of people living somewhere near the Caspian Sea, a subset of whom emanated forth and entered India. And it is the testimony of the Rgveda that is used to deny that any such people ever entered from any such place. The Bible laid the groundwork for the construction of the Aryan invasion theory, and the Rgveda has been the principal foundation for attempts at its deconstruction."
"Although European scholars have long since forgotten the biblical roots of the Aryan problem, Old Testament narrative was certainly an initial factor causing European scholars to interpret the data in selective ways. One must bear in mind that European notions of human history had been based on Genesis for the better part of a millennium and a half. This formative influence was strengthened and then superseded by research intimately connected with the specific political exigencies extant in nineteenth-century Eu- rope. This combination of factors contributed to the development of various assumptions concerning Indo-Aryan (and Indo-European) origins, some of which have remained by and large unquestioned, outside of India, to this very day."
"However, the interpretation of evidence being presented by the Indigenous Aryan group cannot be opposed because of the Hindutva element: that would equally be allowing ideological beliefs to manipulate historical interpretation. Critical scholarship is man- dated to attempt to detach debate on this topic from political orientations concerning personal visions for a modern Indian nation-state."
"Having said that, an attempt was made to make a distinction between Hindutva revisionism and scholarly historical reconsideration motivated by a desire to reexamine the way Indian history was assembled by the colonial power. Unfortunately, these two ingredients are not always easily distinguishable, nor detachable. Nonetheless, this anti- imperialistic, postcolonial dimension to the Aryan invasion debate is an inherent ingredient. Most scholars in this group are concerned with reclaiming control over the re- construction of the ancient history of their country."
"Nonetheless, a principal motive of many Indian scholars in this debate is the desire to reexamine the infrastructure of ancient history that is the legacy of the colonial period and test how secure it actually is by adopting the very tools and disciplines that had been used to construct it in the first place. The Aryan invasion theory is a major foundation stone of ancient Indian history, the "big bang," and has therefore attracted the initial attention of many Indian scholars."
"But frustrating as it might some- times be, Western scholars must address the suspicions of the Indigenists—at least of those that are open to dialogue and exchange—given the neccessity of examining our own attitudes and biases made incumbent on us by the Orientalist critique. The post- colonial climate is a sensitive one, and it should be obvious why there might be very good reasons for Indian scholars to want to reevaluate the version of Indian history that was constructed during the colonial period. One cannot ignore or dismiss the sentiments and opinions of significant numbers of scholars about the history of their own country. And it is never a bad exercise to have one's own assumptions challenged, or to step out of one's own time-worn paradigms momentarily so as to consider things from other perspectives."
"It is imperative, from the Indian side, that the powers that be in Indian universities must recognize the need for historical Indo-European linguistics in their humanities departments if they are to make significant contributions to the protohistory of their subcontinent. Indo-European studies should, if anything, be an Indian forte, not exclusively a European one; many Indian scholars have a distinct head start due to their advanced knowledge of Sanskrit, which still plays a fundamental and extensive role in this field. In particular, it is simply unacceptable that research into substratum influence in Sanskrit texts has primarily been the preserve of a dozen or so Western scholars, however qualified. Vedic, Dravidian, and Munda are Indian languages; this should be a field dominated by Indian linguists. That their input has been so negligible in the one area that could determine much about the whole protohistory of the subcontinent is lamentable. One cannot simply ignore the linguistic evidence. If nothing else, I hope my work has underscored the need for facility to be directed into this field. Much of the literature from the Indigenous Aryan side, and also from the Indian Migrationist side, is hopelessly inadequate from the perspective of linguistics. This has understandably caused the Indigenist point of view to be neglected in toto, to the detriment of the more scholarly, sober, and cogent voices espousing this version of events."
"Neglected viewpoints do not disappear. They reappear with more aggression due to frustration at being ignored. The Indigenous Aryan viewpoint has been around for over a century. It has been stereotyped and, on the whole, summarily dismissed and excluded from academic dialogue. It has hovered, until recently, on the periphery or outside of mainstream academic circles. Since, over the course of the last decade, it has become representative of many scholars within the Indian academy, it is now clamoring for attention more than ever before. It deserves a response articulated in a rigorously critical but fair and respectful fashion. If the claims of the Indigenous Aryanists cannot be decisively disproved, then they cannot be denied a legitimate place in discussions of Indo-Aryan origins. The opinions of significant numbers of Indian intellectuals about the history of their own country cannot simply be ignored by those engaged in research on South Asian history or be relegated to areas outside the boundaries of what is con- sidered worthy of serious academic attention."
"That the early inhabitants of India are still being construed as non-Aryan, snub-nosed dasas on the grounds of the solitary word anasa is astounding, and yet such theories have only very recently been questioned in the West, after a life span of a century and a half. When theories become sufficiently long-lived and commonplace, they cease to strike one as theoretical and can often be- come the facts and building blocks of subsequent realities."
"I trust I may be forgiven for not coming to a clear conclusion myself. Until the script is deciphered, the presently available data are not sufficient to resolve the issue in my mind. The Indo-European languages came from somewhere between the Caspian Sea area (and the Balkans) and northwest South Asia. I do not feel impelled to favor any particular area in this vast expanse: all homeland proposals (not least of all South Asian ones) have significant problems, as I have attempted to outline throughout this work. The Indigenous Aryan critique has certainly influenced my own agnosticism."
"In India, in particular, many scholars understandably are committed to exerting a major role on the construction and representation of the history of South Asia, and this to a great extent involves revisiting and scrutinizing the versions of history inherited from the colonial period."
"These chapters give a good sense of the range of what has been termed “revisionist” scholarship (I do not use this term with the derogatory sense that it has accrued, but in its literal sense of scholarship that is prepared to revise, that is, revisit and reconsider theories and versions of history formulated over the last two centuries)."
"Indeed, one might well wonder how much research would have been invested in the Indo-European problem in the first place, had it not been for its relevance to European imperialism and nationalism."
"In conclusion, any objective and honest attempt at presenting a comprehensive account of the pre-historic period in South Asia should give a fair and adequate representation of the differences of opinion on this matter, as well as of the criticisms that can be levied against any point of view."
"The Indo-Aryan problem is likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future, so we might as well attempt to address it in a cordial fashion."
"This is not the place to dwell on these debates, as important as they are. We will find a good overview in the very well informed and very balanced book by Edwin Bryant which, moreover, demonstrates that, all things considered, no scientific argument allows us to choose between the theses of Indian or extra-Indian origin of the Āryas and, consequently, of the Indo-Europeans... To anyone who doubts the fact that the commonly accepted opinion in the West on the origin of i-e language peoples is based primarily on an intuition that is difficult to demonstrate, I would recommend reading E. Bryant's book. We can clearly see that the debate resurfaces from generation to generation."
"... Given a problem, a difficulty, a maladjustment between the individual and his environment, thinking occurs. If every instinctive act brought satisfaction, thinking would be much less necessary and much less frequently practised."
"... Perhaps Faith and Hope and Love will build the City of God among us. Along with Works. And the works will keep us too busy for mere irony or rebellion or despair."
"... In the vocabulary of medieval thinking all knowledge and science were identical. The end of man was blessedness, and knowledge guided by faith was the avenue to eternal felicity."
"It took a very considerable time for education in art to be regarded as a legitimate part of school training and even many celebrated universities until the last generation had no such thing as a department of fine arts. Even the departments of literature were suspicious of the plastic arts, for men of letters with some notable exceptions have never been at home in the realm of the visual or of the tangible. When art education did finally achieve recognition, it failed to be considered even in unharassed times as being quite on a level of seriousness with even the other liberal arts, or with the physical sciences or with the new and educationally fashionable social studies."
"We are facing a climate catastrophe...The discourse might be going in the right direction, but our actions are going in, decidedly, the wrong direction. (page xi)"
"Confronting climate change means understanding how we got to this point, and challenging some of the basic ways our society and economy are organized. (page xvii)"
"We need to change our economy and our politics if we want to shift to a low-emissions society-our economy because we need to create a system of production that prioritizes human needs rather than increasing consumption, and our politics, because to make this change, we need to take control from a corporate system that has every interest in perpetuating itself. (page 30)"
"Justice matters for its own sake, but I've tried to show here that social, racial, and economic injustice are tightly bound with the history and institutions that have led us to the brink of climate disaster. Our world continues to be shaped by ideologies and practices of progress rooted in Europe's colonial expansion and exploitation of the resources and labor of people of color in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Europeans destroyed traditional lifeways and displaced, dispossessed, and enslaved people of color in their drive to build a new industrialized world based on ever-intensifying extraction of the planet's resources. (page 139)"
"We need to bring issues together because we need to bring people together to build the power necessary to create change. (page 140)"
"We need to understand the system in order to change it. (page 140)"
"The framework of the Green New Deal gives us some radical, concrete, aspirational, yet achievable goals to fight for. A degrowth approach can liberate us to imagine a different, low-carbon, more just, and better world. (page 179)"
"It is especially youth worldwide who are proving willing to acknowledge and mobilize for the kind of deep structural change that we need. Like the inhabitants of Third World countries and especially small island nations, they know that they are, and will be, the victims of others' policies and insouciance. (page 179)"
"Climate justice means recognizing climate change as a moral, political, and economic issue that requires fundamentally reorganizing our global society and economy, not just a question of tweaking incentives and adding technologies. (p 180)"
"The world's most powerful governments and corporations will not act if they are not pressured from below. (p 181)"
"The failure of several decades of top-down reforms, from the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 through the Paris Agreement of 2015, to make any serious dent in our ever-increasing global emissions should be evidence enough that our current institutions are not capable, on their own, of imagining or enacting the kind of changes we need. (p 184)"
"It's hard to mobilize to fight without a vision of the kind of social change you want, and when you have that vision, it's hard not to mobilize to bring it about. The proposals put forth by the degrowth movement, the buen vivir movement, and the Green New Deal for Europe for an economic slowdown predicated on redistribution and social justice have begun to make that alternative vision much more concrete. Youth, and communities on the front lines, already experiencing the ravages of the warming climate, are bringing increasing popular and political urgency to the dire warnings of scientists. (page 185)"
"The independent learners in the sample surveyed were seen to adopt a number of possible learning styles, to engage in a planning of intermediate and terminal learning goals; to generate subjective and objective indices of evaluation and to devise patterns of problem solving. They were adept at using existing information sources to their advantage and created learning networks of fellow enthusiasts for the exchange of advice and information."
"For an activity to qualify as an instance of independent learning it must exhibit learner control over the direction of learning efforts, even if this is temporarily submerged in order to acquire specific skills."
"The myth makes it bigger but when you go in there, you know where you are. I've been in many places bigger than that and it ain't the same."
"You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too... I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something."
"William Eggleston, the pioneer of colour photography shocked the art world in 1976 with his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and his accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide. The exhibition validated colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Alongside his friends and Gary Winogrand, Eggleston is regarded as one of the most inventive and radical photographers of modern times. His reputation continued to grow with the publication of The Democratic Forest in 1989, an epic drawn from, over ten thousand prints, with, an introduction by Eudora Welty. It was described by The New York Times as the first masterpiece of colour photography. Eggleston has always lived in Mississippi and Memphis. His work is deeply rooted in the South, but he transcends the label of Southern artist. His range is international. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition originating at Barbican Art Gallery in London, is the first time work from his whole career has been gathered to form a coherent sequence. It follows a course of ancient and modern from Mississippi to Louisiana and into Elvis Presley's mansion Graceland, through the oil rigs in Tennessee and the orchards of the Transvaal, to the slopes of Mount Kenya and down the Nile, with the collection ending on the lyrical imagery of the English rose. The cumulative effect of Eggleston's startling work reinforces his reputation as a major American artist, whose significance extends beyond the world of photography."
"Eggleston was a man of his time, the 1960s. In the 1960s, street photography was at its zenith, and Pop Art dominated painting and sculpture. Eggleston fused elements of both street photography and Pop Art into his oeuvre. Like Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Stephen Shore, Eggleston shot from the hip, blending the new apolitical snapshot aesthetic with the older and more traditional stylings of Cartier-Bresson."
"Israeli military operations have created an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. But are Israel’s actions — as the nation’s opponents argue — verging on ethnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide? As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time."
"It is clear that the daily violence being unleashed on Gaza is both unbearable and untenable. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas — itself a war crime and a crime against humanity — Israel’s military air and ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, according to the , a number that includes thousands of children. That’s well over five times as many people as the more than 1,400 people in Israel murdered by Hamas. In justifying the assault, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements that indicate a genocidal intent. Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it."
"My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action."
"While we cannot say that the military is explicitly targeting Palestinian civilians, functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide, as has happened more than once in the past."
"If we truly believe that the Holocaust taught us a lesson about the need — or really, the duty — to preserve our own humanity and dignity by protecting those of others, this is the time to stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss. There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide. We cannot wait a moment longer."
"...If there is, to my mind, blame, the blame is in the 1930s and the blame is when millions of people were trying to escape regimes that were saying that they would like to be rid of them. And countries like the Unites States said, well, we have no room, but the United States then had half the population that it has today, so obviously it did have some room. And Hitler at the time was saying, well, nobody wants them so we’ll take care of it. That, I think, is the point. And if you want to learn anything, any sort of lesson from all that, to me there is one important lesson, that when you can identify people who are in need, who are in danger and you just shut your eyes, close your ears and say I don’t want to know about them, then you are signing a death warrant."
"New challenges driven by evolving global technology inspire fresh trends and approaches in teaching statistics in business schools of the 21st century."
"Around this world and to this very day, among experts and novices alike, say the word “evolution” and most people hear the word “genes.” (P. 19)"
"...[A] new breed of philosopher was coming close to declaring that nothing in philosophy makes sense except in the light of evolution. (P. 26)"
"Science is often associated with complicated instruments and questions so specialized that a PhD is required even to become interested. (P. 31)"
"I was offended by the New Atheist movement, which included the public intellectuals Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great, 2007), in addition to Dawkins and Dennett with their evolutionary credentials. In part I was offended by the poor scholarship of the books, which meant that Dawkins and Dennett were falsely trading on their academic reputations. The fact that the books were written for the general reader wasn’t an excuse. The New Atheists clearly began with animosity toward religion and constructed their arguments to support their predetermined conclusion. (P. 33)"
"Building a scientific edifice is a bit like building a cathedral, stone by stone. Shaping each stone—each single study—is hard work but immensely satisfying, especially knowing that it will be durable. (P. 38)"
"If one could only go on and on with original work…, life would be a most beautiful dream; but you…use most of your available time preparing the work of others for publication"
"While we cannot maintain that in everything woman is man’s equal, yet in many things her patience, perseverance, and method make her his superior"
"I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand.…Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men?…And this is considered an enlightened age!"
"My home life is necessarily different from that of other officers of the University since all housekeeping cares rest on me, in addition to those of providing the means to meet their expenses. My son Edward…knows little or nothing of the value of money and, therefore, has the idea but that everything should be forthcoming on demand"
"Labor honestly, conscientiously, and steadfastly, and recognition and success must crown your efforts in the end.”"
"As our race has advanced in civilization, owing its progress to a more and more rigid division of labor, with the attendant and ever increasing specialization by which each piece of the great machine does its work more perfectly, yet more and more completely loses its direct touch with all but a few of the other parts, most men have lost much of what was at first common to all; and this, perhaps, quite as true as of a knowledge of plants as of anything else."
"The development of any department of science is closely connected with its power of interesting men."