Members of the American Philosophical Society

"Another equally true saying of Schumann is that, compared with Beethoven, Schubert is as a woman to a man. For it must be confessed that one's attitudes towards him is almost always that of sympathy, attraction, and love, rarely that of embarrassment or fear. Here and there only, as in the Rosamund B minor Entr'acte, or the Finale of the 10th symphony, does he compel his listeners with an irrestistible power; and yet how different is this compulsion from the strong, fierce, merciless coercion, with which Beethoven forces you along, and bows and bends you to his will.""

"I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer."

"All this is very good in theory, but in practice, you take a piece of iron, wind a wire around it, then plug the wire in. The core gets hot, the wires smoke, and the fuse blows. So you see, there are practical limitations to theory."

"As soon as we started looking at them, we saw the most remarkable situation. My first thought was, "Great guns! Something's gone wrong with the apparatus!" But then we got later North American tapes and everything seemed normal again."

"Apparently, something happens on the sun. It sends out a burst of gases. The reservoirs above our earth shake like a bowl of jelly. The radiation droozles out at the ends and makes the auroral displays at the North and South Poles."

"After a vast research program, which depended very heavily upon the use of a number of highspeed computers, I am pleased to offer you the result: "Space is that in which everything else is." In other words, "Space is the hole that we are in.""

"A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now. He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working."

""This is John Lear, Science Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, calling from New York". (Heavy emphasis on "calling from New York," then a long pause waiting for me to recover from the thrill of hearing from such an important person, in New York, no less.) Actually, I did know who he was and had often characterized him as the anti-science editor of the Saturday Review. He continued: "I read of your recent report of the discovery of radiation belts of the Earth and thought that I would do a piece on the subject. What I found remarkable was that such important work had been done at a midwestern state university." Well, I don't think that I responded with any profanity but I did manage to convey a suggestion as to what he could do with his piece and hung up. The next day, the president of my university, Virgil M. Hancher, called me to report that Mr. Lear had called him to complain about my discourtesy. I then gave a brief explanation of my reaction, at the end of which Hancher replied "I promised Lear that I would call you and you may now consider that I have done so. And, by the way, Van, my congratulations!" I never heard from the matter again. It's great to have a boss like that."

"Modern experimentation is often like driving an automobile. The details and theory of the instruments being used in the experiment are not known to the experimenter except in a very general way. (...) Experimenters are taught in an explicit way, often, how to write up reports of their experiments. But the tradition here is like sports reporting. Only the results of the experiment are reported in any serious detail. The procedures are not."

"Remember, Aristotle's De Anima is a seamless mixture of the science and philosophy of his time. We can aim at something similar, i.e. we should feel very comfortable using scientific results in philosophy. It does not mean philosophers must become scientists."

"The nature of the chemical bond is the problem at the heart of all chemistry."

"So long as you live and in whatever circumstances the kaleidoscope of life may place you, think for yourself and act in accordance with the conclusions of that thinking; avoid so far as possible drifting with the current of the mob or being too easily influenced by the outward manifestation of things. Take your own look beneath the surface and don't trust others to look for you. If you will follow this rule consistently, I am sure you will keep out of much trouble, will make the most out of your life and, what is more, will contribute most of value to the community life."

"The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny."

"We need a spirit of adoption to take us out of the foundling hospital of the world, and to put us into the celestial family."

"Work is God's ordinance as truly as prayer."

"The same individual geese on which we conducted these experiments, first aroused my interest in the process of domestication. They were F1 hybrids of wild Greylags and domestic geese and they showed surprising deviations from the normal social and sexual behaviour of the wild birds. I realised that an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding as well as of copulation and a waning of more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals. I was frightened – as I still am – by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity. Moved by this fear, I did a very ill-advised thing soon after the Germans had invaded Austria: I wrote about the dangers of domestication and, in order to be understood, I couched my writing in the worst of nazi-terminology. I do not want to extenuate this action. I did, indeed, believe that some good might come of the new rulers. The precedent narrow-minded catholic regime in Austria induced better and more intelligent men than I was to cherish this naive hope. Practically all my friends and teachers did so, including my own father who certainly was a kindly and humane man. None of us as much as suspected that the word "selection", when used by these rulers, meant murder. I regret those writings not so much for the undeniable discredit they reflect on my person as for their effect of hampering the future recognition of the dangers of domestication."

"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young."

"All too willingly man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error and remain deaf to the wisest command ever given by a sage, the famous "Know thyself" inscribed in the temple of Delphi."

"The scientist who considers himself absolutely "objective" and believes that he can free himself from the compulsion of the "merely" subjective should try — only in imagination of course — to kill in succession a lettuce, a fly, a frog, a guineapig, a cat, a dog, and finally a chimpanzee. He will then be aware how increasingly difficult murder becomes as the victim's level of organisation rises. The degree of inhibition against killing each one of these beings is a very precise measure for the considerably different values that we cannot help attributing to lower and higher forms of life. To any man who finds it equally easy to chop up a live dog and a live lettuce I would recommend suicide at his earliest convenience!"

"We are the highest achievement reached so far by the great constructors of evolution. We are their "latest" but certainly not their last word. The scientist must not regard anything as absolute, not even the laws of pure reason. He must remain aware of the great fact, discovered by Heraclitus, that nothing whatever really remains the same even for one moment, but that everything is perpetually changing. To regard man, the most ephemeral and rapidly evolving of all species, as the final and unsurpassable achievement of creation, especially at his present-day particularly dangerous and disagreeable stage of development, is certainly the most arrogant and dangerous of all untenable doctrines. If I thought of man as the final image of God, I should not know what to think of God. But when I consider that our ancestors, at a time fairly recent in relation to the earth's history, were perfectly ordinary apes, closely related to chimpanzees, I see a glimmer of hope. It does not require very great optimism to assume that from us human beings something better and higher may evolve. Far from seeing in man the irrevocable and unsurpassable image of God, I assert – more modestly and, I believe, in greater awe of the Creation and its infinite possibilities – that the long-sought missing link between animals and the really humane being is ourselves!"

"Nobody can seriously believe that free will means that it is left entirely to the will of the individual, as to an irresponsible tyrant, to do or not do whatever he pleases. Our freest will underlies strict moral laws, and one of the reasons for our longing for freedom is to prevent our obeying other laws than these. It is significant that the anguished feeling of not being free is never evoked by the realisation that our behaviour is just as firmly bound to moral laws as physiological processes are to physical ones. We are all agreed that the greatest and most precious freedom of man is identical with the moral laws within him. Increasing knowledge of the natural causes of his own behaviour can certainly increase a man's faculties and enable him to put his free will into action, but it can never diminish his will. If, in the impossible case of an utopian complete and ultimate success of causal analysis, man should ever achieve complete insight into the causality of earthly phenomena, including the workings of his own organism, he would not cease to have a will but it would be in perfect harmony with the incontrovertible lawfulness of the universe, the Weltvernunft of the Logos. This idea is foreign only to our present-day western thought; it was quite familiar to ancient Indian philosophy and to the mystics of the middle ages."

"I now come to the third great obstacle to human self-knowledge, to the belief — deeply rooted in our western culture — that what can be explained in terms of natural science has no values. This belief springs from an exaggeration of Kant's values-philosophy, the consequence of the idealistic dichotomy of the world into the external world of things and the internal laws of human reason."

"The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!""

"Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."… Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens?"

"Let us imagine that an absolutely unbiased investigator on another planet, perhaps on Mars, is examining human behavior on earth, with the aid of a telescope whose magnification is too small to enable him to discern individuals and follow their separate behavior, but large enough for him to observe occurrences such as migrations of peoples, wars, and similar great historical events. He would never gain the impression that human behavior was dictated by intelligence, still less by responsible morality."

"All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction."

"The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality.... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual.... One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff."

"Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good."

"Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. (Of course we must postulate other changes in Paul's ways of reasoning, including how he changes belief in response to experience, to maintain coherence.) Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. Or perhaps he confuses running toward it with running away from it, believing of the action that is really running away from it, that it is running toward it; or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly occurring illusion, and, hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever confronted with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a sixteen-hundred-meter race, wants to win, and thinks the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps. . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour."

"To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him."

"At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we don't know that there is such a person as God, we don't know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because (from the point of view of the model) the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence. We don't know what our happiness consists in, and we don't know how to achieve it. We don't know that we have been created in the image of God, and we don't grasp the significance of such characteristically human phenomena as love, humor, adventure, science, art, music, philosophy, history, and so on."

"Aquinas believes that human beings (even in our earthly condition here below) can have knowledge, scientific knowledge of God's existence, as well as knowledge that he has such attributes as simplicity, eternità, immateriality, immutability, and the line. In Summa Theologiae Aquinas sets out his famous Five Ways or five proofs of God's existence: in Summa Contra Gentiles he sets out the proof from motion in much greater detail; and in each case he follows these alleged demonstrations with alleged demonstrations that God possesses the attributes just mentioned. So natural knowledge of God is possible. [...] So most of those who believe in God do so on faith. Fundamentally, for Aquinas, to accept a proposition on faith is to accept it on God's authority; faith is a manner of "believing God" (ST, IIa, IIae, ii, 2) "for that which is above reason we believe only because God has revealed it" (SCG, I, 9)."

"I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term 'fundamentalist'. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like 'son of a bitch', more exactly 'sonovabitch', or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) 'sumbitch'. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of 'fundamentalist' (in this widely current use): it isn't simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like stupid sumbitch' (or maybe fascist sumbitch'?) than 'sumbitch' simpliciter. It isn't exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase 'considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.' The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like 'stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine'."

"Well, I don't think there are any methodological conflicts either. As for those social conflicts, those aren't conflicts—in my opinion—between science and religion. They're conflicts between Christians and atheists or Christians and secularists: Christians want to do things one way, secularists want to do things another way. But that's not a science/religion conflict at all. You might as well say it's a science/secularism conflict. In each case, each group wants to do science and then use it in a certain way."

"Like I say, you gotta have a PhD in engineering just to use your thermostat. And that seems over the top to me. [...] It’s not real nice, you know. If you live in Arizona, you get used to it, but we don’t. And it’s right after a really cold, kind of wet, spring. So we weren’t really up for that at all. [...] You know, there are worse things. I mean, if it were like, say, ten below zero, that would be worse."

"Alvin Plantinga is arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century."

"The shaping or reformulation of the aims of economic policy which are only vaguely felt may be exemplified in the aim of social justice."

"For some queer and deplorable reason most human beings are more impressed by words than by figures, to the great disadvantage of mankind."

"A just social order can best be described as a humanist socialism, because its goal would be the establishment of equal possibilities within and between all countries, and at its base would lie universal human values"

"To Ehrenfest I owe a great deal. I studied physics at a time when a number of fascinating persons were there together. Ehrenfest would not instruct as such, as he preferred dialogue. Thanks to him I could participate in discussions with Albert Einstein. Also Kamerling Onnes, Lorentz and Zeeman were present. Being a student in the hands of such teachers, you are very fortunate indeed."

"Mankind’s problems can no longer be solved by national governments. What is needed is a World Government. This can best be achieved by strengthening the United Nations system. In some cases, this would mean changing the role of UN agencies from advice-giving to implementation. But some of the most important new institutions would be financial—a World Treasury and a World Central Bank. Just as each nation has a system of income redistribution, so there should be a corresponding ‘World Financial Policy’ to be implemented by the World Bank and the World Central Bank. Some of these proposals are, no doubt, far-fetched and beyond the horizon of today’s political possibilities. But the idealist of today often turns out to be the realists of tomorrow."

"Econometrics is the name for a field of science in which mathematical-economic and mathematical-statistical research are applied in combination. Econometrics, therefore, forms a borderland between two branches of science, with the advantages and disadvantages thereof; advantages, because new combinations are introduced which often open up new perspectives; disadvantages, because the work in this field requires skill in two domains, which either takes up too much time or leads to insufficient training of its students in one of the two respects."

"As a boundary science, econometrics is younger than the adjacent regions, which fact likewise has advantages and disadvantages. As a disadvantage, the lack of an established doctrine, and also the lack of established textbooks, can be felt; as an advantage is the fresh enthusiasm, with which its students work."

"The world is in a process of a great transformation. In a considerable part of it a new economic order, "communism," is being vigorously tried out. Elsewhere an old order is passing as one country after another throws of the yoke of colonialism. The wholesale introduction of Western techniques and ways of life shaking the foundations of numerous beliefs and attitudes, for good and for evil."

"The main sources of tension in today's world economy could be grouped under the following categories:"

"The factor of distance may also stand for an index of information about export markets."

"The dominant role played by... exporters’ and importers’ GNP and distance in explaining trade flows."

"First of all I want to remind you of the essential features of models. In my opinion they are: (i) drawing up a list of the variables to be considered; (ii) drawing up a list of the equations or relations the variables have to obey and (iii) testing the validity of the equations, which implies the estimation of their coefficients, if any. As a consequence of especially (iii) we may have to revise (i) and (ii) so as to arrive at a satisfactory degree of realism of the theory embodied in the model. Then, the model may be used for various purposes, that is, for the solution of various problems. The advantages of models are, on one hand, that they force us to present a "complete" theory by which I mean a theory taking into account all relevant phenomena and relations and, on the other hand, the confrontation with observation, that is, reality. Of course these remarks are far from new."

"The advantages of models are, on one hand, that they force us to present a "complete" theory by which I mean a theory taking into account all relevant phenomena and relations and, on the other hand, the confrontation with observation, that is, reality."

"Models constitute a framework or a skeleton and the flesh and blood will have to be added by a lot of common sense and knowledge of details."

"It is also our hope that the interpretation of the socio-economic optimum as a set of institutions may help to get under way a discussion of a more scientific character than was usual so far about the relative merits of various existing socio-economic orders, especially those of Eastern and Western Europe, including such interesting cases as Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. A considerable amount of better information about various types of external effects will be one of the necessary ingredients if we want to give concrete content to such merit rating of various systems."

"It is my hope that in such a way we may again, as Marx claimed, find scientific arguments in the competition between various systems, but up-to-date scientific arguments rather than obsolete ones. This more fundamental research in economics deserves relatively more attention and resources than the more superficial versions of economic research directed at forecasting or analysing very short-term fluctuations in market prices, on which quite some money is being spent to-day."

"What matters is the di¤erence between qualities available and qualities required by the demand side, that is by the organization of production."

"The two preponderant forces at work are technological development, which made for a relative increase in demand and hence in the income ratio... and increased access to schooling, which made for a relative decrease."

"The central question of economic policy is the question of the effectiveness of its various instruments."

"An inequality-furthering phenomenon is technological development. But need it be? Increasingly we get the feeling that technological development is not simply something given, but that it may be guided, within limits."

"Educational policies deserve to be programmed not only with a view to improving education in the widest sense, but also in order to ináuence the income distribution."

"Tinbergen's methodology was exceptional at that time and was received sometimes with scepticism. In particular J.M. Keynes (1939), at the time editor of the Economic Journal, reviewed 'Professor Tinbergen's Method' quite critically, raising as one of the fundamental points that 'The method is neither of discovery nor of criticism. It is a means of giving quantitative precision to what, in qualitative terms, we know already as the result of a complete theoretical analysis.' Of course the latter criticism illustrates precisely Tinbergen's conviction that knowledge relevant for policy making should preferably be quantitative in nature. As to 'discovery,' Tinbergen (1940) in his 'Reply' indicated that 'it sometimes happens that the course of the curves itself suggests that some factor not mentioned in most economic textbooks must be of great importance,' and he mentioned some examples. 'As to the possibility of 'criticism,' it seems to me,' Tinbergen (1940) argued, 'that the value found for one or more of the regression coefficients may imply a criticism on one or more of the theories that have been used.' In a 'Comment' to Tinbergen's 'Reply,' Keynes (1940) still held some doubts: 'that there is anyone I would trust with it at the present stage or that this brand of statistical alchemy is ripe to become a branch of science, I am not yet persuaded.' But Keynes concluded: 'No one could be more frank, more painstaking, more free from subjective bias or parti pris than professor Tinbergen... But Newton, Boyle and Locke all played with alchemy. So let him continue.' And so Tinbergen did."

"Along with Frisch and others Tinbergen developed the field of econometrics, the use of statistical tools to test economic hypotheses. Tinbergen was one of the first economists to create multiequation models of economies. He produced a twenty-seven-equation econometric model of the Dutch economy, and his 1939 book, Business Cycles in the United States, 1919–1932, includes a forty-eight-equation model of the American economy that explains investment activity and models American business cycles."

"Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."

"We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them."

"[…] the virtues of a medicine depend less upon its intrinsic properties and powers than on the sagacity of the physician who administers it; just as the efficiency of firearms depends less upon the explosives and the missile they contain than on the judgment and accuracy of aim of the man who discharges them."

"A failure to help that polar bear – or any individual animal in a comparable condition, regardless of our responsibility (direct or indirect) for that suffering – is. Nor can lack of action be defended by some alleged concern for the course of nature ('We must not interfere!') or the gene pool of the species ('Let the weak die!'). Consider someone who would use those same arguments to justify not intervening to help relieve the suffering of particular human beings during a famine or after a tsunami, or someone who would use such arguments to say that we should not give antibiotics to a child with pneumonia. Such an attitude, reminiscent of various Charles Dickens characters, would be rejected out of hand as immoral. If the only morally relevant factor is 'can they suffer?', there is no relevant moral difference when animals suffer pain that we can alleviate."

"The Treatise is also one of the most important books of Western thought ever written. Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state."

"The economist studies the disposal of scarce means. He is interested in the way different degrees of scarcity of different goods give rise to different ratios of valuation between them, and he is interested in the way in which changes in conditions of scarcity, whether coming from changes in ends or changes in means—from the demand side or the supply side—affect these ratios. Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

"It has been the object…to show that if recovery is to be maintained and future progress assured, there must be a more or less complete reversal of contemporary tendencies of governmental regulation of enterprise. The aim of governmental policy in regard to industry must be to create a field in which the forces of enterprise and the disposal of resources are once more allowed to be governed by the market.But what is this but the restoration of capitalism? And is not the restoration of capitalism the restoration of the causes of depression?If the analysis of this essay is correct, the answer is unequivocal. The conditions of recovery which have been stated do indeed involve the restoration of what has been called capitalism. But the slump was not due to these conditions. On the contrary, it was due to their negation. It was due to monetary mismanagement and State intervention operating in a milieu in which the essential strength of capitalism had already been sapped by war and by policy. Ever since the outbreak of war in 1914, the whole tendency of policy has been away from that system, which in spite of the persistence of feudal obstacles and the unprecedented multiplication of the people, produced that enormous increase of wealth per head…. Whether that increase will be resumed, or whether, after perhaps some recovery, we shall be plunged anew into depression and the chaos of planning and restrictionism—that is the issue which depends on our willingness to reverse this tendency."

"I shall always regard this aspect of my dispute with Keynes as the greatest mistake of my professional career, and the book, The Great Depression, which I subsequently wrote, partly in justification of this attitude, as something which I would willingly see be forgotten. […] Now I still think that there is much in this theory as an explanation of a possible generation of boom and crisis. But, as an explanation of what was going on in the early ’30s, I now think it was misleading. Whatever the genetic factors of the pre-1929 boom, their sequelae, in the sense of inappropriate investments fostered by wrong expectations, were completely swamped by vast deflationary forces sweeping away all those elements of constancy in the situation which otherwise might have provided a framework for an explanation in my terms. The theory was inadequate to the facts. Nor was this approach any more adequate as a guide to policy. Confronted with the freezing deflation of those days, the idea that the prime essential was the writing down of mistaken investments and the easing of capital markets by fostering the disposition to save and reducing the pressure on consumption was completely inappropriate. To treat what developed subsequently in the way which I then thought valid was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulants to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating."

"I picked up a copy of Lionel Robbins’s 1934 book The Great Depression in a used book shop in Norwich. It's quite revealing: judicious in tone, full of tables and facts, clearly meant to be seen as the work of a wise observer – indeed, a Very Serious Person.And utterly, utterly wrongheaded"

"Lionel Robbins's The Great Depression (Macmillan, 1934) is one of the great economic works of our time. Its greatness lies not so much in originality of economic thought, as in the application of the best economic thought to the explanation of the cataclysmic phenomena of the Great Depression. This is unquestionably the best work published on the Great Depression. … To his work, Robbins brought a clarity and polish of style that I believe to be unequalled among any economists, past or present. Robbins is the premier economic stylist."

"Philippe Durance: ... How does one become Michel Crozier?"

"The first of the two cases which we are about to discuss concerns a large-scale Parisian administrative organization which may be described as rigid, standardized, and impersonal, and which seems unable to cope with the human and technical problems engendered by its recently accelerated growth. Its hierarchical structure, its promotional system, and its principles of organization are extremely simple. The behavior of its different categories of personnel, as actors within its social system, is therefore much easier to analyze. The actors appear to be both extremely rational and extremely predictable, as if they were playing a game that followed an experimental model. We shall use the opportunity afforded by such a situation to try to understand better one of the most fundamental problems usually associated with the concept of bureaucracy, the problem of routine."

"Power is a very difficult problem with which to deal in the theory of organization."

"The classic rationalists did not consider the members of an organization as human beings, but just as cogs in the machine. For them, workers were only hands. The human relations approach has shown how incomplete this rationale was. It has also made it possible to consider workers as creatures of feeling, who are moved by the impact of the so-called rational decisions taken above then, and will react to them. A human being, however, does not have only a hand a heart. He also had a head, which means that he is free to play his own game."

"Is democracy in crisis? This question is being posed with increasing urgency by some of the leading statesmen of the West, by columnists and scholars, and— if public opinion polls are to be trusted— even by the publics. In some respects, the mood of today is reminiscent of that of the early twenties, when the views of Oswald Spengler regarding "The Decline of the West" were highly popular. This pessimism is echoed, with obvious Schadenfreude, by various communist observers, who speak with growing confidence of "the general crisis of capitalism" and who see in it the confirmation of their own theories."

"Much of the pioneering work in organization theory was written about public organizations, or with public organizations in mind. When Weber wrote about bureaucracy, he was thinking of the Prussian civil service. Philip Selznick began his scholarly career writing about the New Deal in TVA and the Grass Roots (1953). Herbert Simon’s first published article (1937) was on municipal government performance measurement, and Simon also coauthored early in his career a book called Public Administration (1950) and a number of papers (e.g., Simon, 1953) published in Public Administration Review. Michel Crozier’s classic, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1954), was about two government organizations in France."

"Crozier's breakthrough book, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1963 in French, 1964 in English), is a still wonderful account of how an organisation as a system generates the overlapping vicious circles that then block the system. The voices of his interviewees in two public service organisations, one a clerical agency, the other a state industrial monopoly, explaining their attitudes and their behaviour, are as fresh as if they had been uttered yesterday. This book heralded a consistent theme in Crozier's work that organisational reform is not possible unless its proponents take into account the way that people will interpret it, react to it and subvert it. As Crozier put it in the title of a 1979 book: "You can't change a society by decree.""

"The Bureaucratic Phenomenon was the first of a series of books published over a 15-year period through which Michel stimulated attention to the organizations of contemporary society and their contributions to social and political problems. In La société bloquée (1970), L’acteur et le système (with co-author Erhard Freiberg; 1977), and On ne change pas la société par décret (1979), he explored modern, particularly French, society and its social, political, and economic structures. Better than most, he saw the difficulties of achieving democratic aspirations in a modern nation state. In particular, as his 1979 book trumpeted, he saw that modern societies did not change simply by giving them well-intentioned orders."

"The ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus, propounded an hypothesis of the constitution of matter, and gave the name of atoms to the ultimate unalterable parts of which he imagined all bodies to be constructed. In the 17th century, Gassendi revived this hypothesis, and attempted to develope it, while Newton used it with marked success in his reasonings on physical phenomena; but the first who formed a body of doctrine which would embrace all known facts in the constitution of matter, was Roger Joseph Boscovich, of Italy, who published at Vienna, in 1759, a most important and ingenious work, styled Theoria Philosophiæ Naturalis ad unicam legem virium, in Natura existentium redacta. This is one of the most profound contributions ever made to science; filled with curious and important information, and is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the modern student. In more recent days, the theory of Boscovich has received further confirmation and extension in the researches of Dalton, Joule, Thomson, Faraday, Tyndall, and others."

"THEOREM: if G is a locally euclidean, connected, simply connected topological group of dimension n greater than one, then G contains a closed proper subgroup of positive dimension."

"A group which has a simple structure may offer difficult questions when operating as a transformation group. For example, the ways in which a cyclic group of order 2 can operate on a manifold, even on E 3, are far from completely known."

"Others have spoken and written about his solution of Hilbert's fifth problem, but perhaps not enough is said about his later work, especially his joint work with C. T. Yang. In a long series of papers written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they used the study of group actions on homotopy 7-spheres to showcase and test the growing new techniques of differential topology, especially index theory and surgery theory. At a time when much work in topology consisted in building these machines, their papers demonstrated the beauty of applying this theory to unfurl complexities of symmetry and structure."

"[L]et me refer to my original work. Naturally, if a student has been hammering away ever since 1979... he must have accumulated a lot of litter, much of which, perhaps, should have long since been swept away. But the fates are not to be bribed either by pother or importunity. Out of 1,000 men who are called, one (probably the ratio is much smaller) is chosen to do glorious scientific work. The others? Their lot is failure. They may be equally or even more industrious, they may have equal or even greater brain power—the other 999 exist merely to make the illustrious one in whom they culminate, possible. After that, the world will say to each in words of poetic brevity: "The man has done his duty, the man can go." And they do, pretty quickly, to a gentler lethe, flowing between the banks of amaranth and asphodel. Gentlemen, I am one of the 999 about to be forgotten."

"[F]ew important steps in dynamical geology will be made until the methods for the accurate measurement of high temperatures and high pressures have not only been perfected but rendered easily available. On the basis of this conviction the present memoir on high temperatures has been prepared... [I]f the investigation be of any fullness, it is almost essential that the observer master the component parts of his research separately; and not until he has satisfactorily done this can he apply them conjointly."

"[T]he rooms which had been placed at my disposal by the American Museum of New York became temporarily unavailable. ...[W]e determined to rent a house in New Haven, Conn., and thither the laboratory was removed in November, 1882. ...[T]he city offered excellent library and other facilities for scientific work, such as can be met only in the immediate vicinity of a large university [Yale College]. ...The work in New Haven was not satisfactorily completed. In July, 1883, with the appointment of Prof. F. W. Clarke as chief chemist of the Geological Survey, our laboratory was officially connected with the chemical laboratory. Conformably with the further decision of the Director, by which the divers laboratories of the Geological Survey were united in one central laboratory in Washington, it was again necessary to change our basis of operations, this time... from New Haven to Washington. In the quarters assigned to us in the U. S. National Museum, temperature work on so large a scale... appeared impracticable, and it was therefore abandoned. ...In place of the dangerous and cumbersome apparatus of the former laboratory, the endeavor is made to reduce all apparatus to the smallest dimensions compatible with reasonable accuracy of measurement."

"I make... a cursory survey of certain pyro-electric properties of the alloys of . Curiously... the data... led to a striking result.. it appears that the zero resistance f(0), if the resistance at t^O be r = f(t), and the zero coefficient f^{\prime}(0)/f(0), are related to each other by a law which during the stages of low percentage alloying is independent of the ingredients of the alloy, except in so far as they modify its electrical conductivity."

"I develop a method for the direct and expeditious comparison of the thermo-couple with the air thermometer. A comparison of the data... gives me a criterion of the accuracy with which the data in the region of high temperature are known. This indirect method... is not apparently as rigorous as their direct evaluation by means of the air thermometer; but the indirect method requires much smaller quantities of substance and may be conveniently extended to much higher temperatures. Taking all liabilities to error into consideration, its inferior accuracy is only apparent."

"Looking over such famous old books as Montmort's 'Analyse des jeux de hasard' or Moivre's 'Doctrine of Chances' one regrets that so much excellent mathematics should have been wasted on games most of which are wholly obsolete. Coriolus in his '[Théorie Mathématique des Effets du] Jeu de billard' (1835) fared better, for the game is still very much alive and its dynamical terrors unsubdued."

"In even greater measure is this true of the top. The top has been everybody's toy and must, therefore, at one time or another have piqued everybody's curiosity. Lagrange, Poinsot, Jacobi, not to mention other great names, have in turn paid their tribute; yet the top may be set spinning to-day, unhampered by a completed theory to account for its evolutions."

"Among recent contributions we may refer in particular to Professor A. G. Greenhill's noteworthy papers... when one remembers that these complex curves reach only especially simple cases of motion, one may get some notion of the difficulty of the problem involved."

"Turning to Klein's little book, one is astonished in finding the most general aspects of the subject treated almost without computation and in so little space. ...It would have cost little to give the expanded form of the σ-function. ...Weierstrass's original notation was in terms of Abelian functions. The tremendous development of s is out of proportion with their application to natural phenomena. Meeting them rarely one forgets them. Memory peters out like the infinite series of a ζ-function."

"Mathematicians will do well to observe that a reasonable acquaintance with theoretical physics at its present stage of development, to mention only such broad subjects as electricity, elastics, hydrodynamics, etc., is as much as most of us can keep permanently assimilated. It should also be remembered that the step from the formal elegance of theory to the brute arithmetic of the special case is always humiliating, and that this labor usually falls to the lot of the physicist."

"The lecture concludes with a demonstration showing that a free body in hyperbolic non Euclidean space may be so fashioned as in real time to carry out the actual motions of the top. The form of such a body and the forces to actuate it are specified. Klein lays great stress on the beauty of this generalization. ...The full geometry of this case is not carried out in these lectures, however, and Klein regrets that the development of the s has recently fallen into abeyance."

"The reviewer is aware... he has given an imperfect account of this remarkable book. That Klein's researches constitute a splendid advance in dynamics of the rotation of a rigid body there can be no question. One cannot but hope that the outline given in these Princeton lectures may soon be expanded and put in shape more easily assimilated by persons more moderately versed in the theory of elliptic functions."

"The boon of an appropriate lemma is ideal generosity, and not even a mathematician can scorn its almost mathematical elegance."

"A man may be a thoroughgoing soldier enough on land; but put him in the foot ropes of the flying jibboom in a storm, and he is apt to cut a most ludicrous figure. Shift a physicist's foothold of Cartesian differential coordinates, suspend him over an abyss of non-Euclidean space, and he will kick sturdily. Poor policy this, for a missionary!"

"The presiding officer of this [Physics] section was Prof. Carl Barus, who fills the chair of Physics in Brown University. His inaugural address was on "Long Range Temperature and Pressure Variables in Physics." He began by giving a history of the various attempts to provide suitable apparatus for high-temperature measurement. Fusion first played an important part in the manufacture of s, and later those instruments based on specific heat showed an advantage over the fusion instruments. The was referred to as the only fruitful method of absolute pyrometry. The speaker dwelt at length on high-temperature work, the first thorough-going instance of which was by Prinsep in 1829. Then the experiments down to 1887 were considered in detail, and the conclusion reached that the data furnished by the Reichsanstalt will eventually be standard. ...Turning to the applications of pyrometry, he referred to the variation of metallic ebullition with pressure. Results already attained show an effect of pressure regularly more marked as the normal boiling point is higher. Igneous fusion was considered in its relation to pressure and with regard to the solidity of the earth, and the inference was drawn that the interior solidity of the earth, now generally admitted, is due only to superincumbent pressure, withholding fusion. The question of heat conduction was next taken up, and the results deduced by various writers as to the discussed. High pressure measurement was lengthily dealt with. Passing from this subject, the of liquids was considered. ...The paper ended with a reference to isothermals and several kindred subjects."

"In the decade between 1882 and 1892 contributions to gas thermometry and the measurement of high temperatures are few and unimportant, but work was begun in those years on both sides of the Atlantic which, for the experimental skill and persistence with which the experimental difficulties and limitations were pursued and successively overcome, surpasses any effort which has been made either before or since that time. These were the investigations of Barus at the U.S. Geological Survey in Washington and of [Ludwig] Holborn and his colleagues at the Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg. Barus (1889) recognized as no observer who preceded him had done, the superlative importance of a uniform temperature distribution about the gas thermometer bulb for purposes of high-temperature measurement, and he took the most extraordinary precautions to maintain it. A temperature of 1000° C or more is not attained without very steep temperature gradients in the region immediately surrounding the zone of highest temperature. It is therefore a problem of great difficulty to introduce a bulb of from 10 to 20 cm. in its largest dimension into this hot zone without leaving some portion of it projecting out into a region 200° or 300° lower in temperature. Burning mixtures of gas and air for heating purposes also contributed to the irregularity and uncertainity of the temperature distribution about the bulb. Barus sought to avoid this by a method of great ingenuity, but also of great technical difficulty. He inclosed his bulb within a rapidly revolving muffle which by its motion protected every portion of the bulb from direct exposure to a particularly hot or a particularly cold portion of the adjacent furnace. This complicated furnace structure and consequently inaccessible position of the bulb made it impossible to introduce into the region about the bulb the substances whose temperature constants were to be measured and compelled him to use thermo-elements which were first calibrated by exposure in the furnace with the bulb and then used independently to measure other desired temperatures. The thermo-element has continued in general use in this intermediary rôle since that time. In the preparation and use of thermo-elements Barus also made much more extensive and elaborate studies than any one who has followed him. ...It is an unfortunate accident that history has failed to record Barus's name along with that of Le Chatelier in the development of the thermo-element for purposes of high-temperature measurement. It hardly admits of question that Barus contributed incomparably more to our knowledge of the thermo-electric properties of the different metals and their use than his distinguished French contemporary, but the 10 per cent iridium alloy which he finally selected proved to be less serviceable than the 10 per cent rhodium alloy developed by Le Chatelier... And so we find the Le Chatelier platin-rhodium thermo-element in use to-day the world over, while the magnificent pioneer work of Barus remains but little known."

"[T]he author, whose work on nuclei is well known, describes a number of investigations carried out with his fog-chamber apparatus. The apparatus having been sufficiently improved, it was used for various experiments, including the growth of persistent nuclei, the production of water nuclei by evaporation, the results obtained when X-rays are allowed to strike the fog-chamber from different distances, the effect due to radium, &c. Other problems dealt with in the book are the distribution of colloidal nuclei and of ions in media other than air-water, the simultaneous variation of the nucleation and the ionization of the atmosphere of Providence, and the variations of the colloidal nucleation of dust-free air in course of time."

"When the history of the progress of physics in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is written, the name of Carl Barus will occupy an important place."

"At Brown University Carl Barus and Alpheus Packard are undoubtedly the most eminent scientists who ever occupied faculty chairs. Professor Barus was a hero-worshipper and in his home was a genius corner from which pictured faces of great scientists looked down upon him. ...The breadth of his interest and achievements was extraordinar—recall his reading of Greek tradedies in the original, his knowledge of French and Italian literatures, and the proficiency he attained in playing the violin, flute, clarinet, oboe, cornet, trumpet and trombone, in addition to the piano and organ. The brilliancy of his intellect, the modesty of his bearing, the beauty of his personality, and the kindliness of his spirit have left most precious and inspiring memories..."

"Carl Barus loved music, and composed about fifty compositions, among them a March to Pembrok Hall... and an Ode to the Steam Shovel, inspired by the daily noise outside his laboratory and was presented by him to President Faunce."

"“Undergraduates, early in my classes, often think they’re smarter than the people who lived in 400 A.D.,” McCormick says. “Bit by bit, they begin to understand that those people were no more stupid or evil or smart than we are. They were very much like us.” (2011)"

"“In recent years, historians have become increasingly aware of two things. The first is the power of material evidence — including scientific evidence — beyond the written sources we’ve traditionally worked with since the 18th and 19th centuries. The second is that … exogenous factors, such as environment, also play a role in the development of human societies.” (2014)"

"“You and I have the extraordinary privilege of living in a time of revolutionary discovery … that extends advances of technology in the life sciences that are transforming the world today to … disciplines that are transforming our understanding of the human past, dissolving the timeworn barriers between history and prehistory, between science and the humanities.” (2014)"

"“Modern leaders, with their careful preparation and with their detailed planning, sometimes lose sight … that there are exogenous jokers, wild cards, out there that are coming out of the blue and are capable of knocking civilization off its wheels.” (2016)"

"Describing the Tirtha of Vijayeshvara, Stein gives this detail: The ancient town which once stood in the position indicated, was evidently succeeded by Vijayeshwara, the present Vijbror. The latter place situated less than two miles above Chakradhara, received its name from the ancient shrine of Shiva Vijayeshwara (Vijyesha, Vijayeshana ), the present Vijbror. This deity is worshipped to the present day at Vijbror. The site has evidently from early times been one of the most famous Tirthas of Kashmir. It is mentioned as such in the Rajaratangini and many old Kashmrian texts....The old Linga of Shiva Vijyeshwara seems to have been destroyed by Sikandar Butshikan."

"‘The identity of the first four rivers here enumerated . . . is subject to no doubt. They correspond to the present Ganges, Jumna, Sarsuti, Sutlej . . . The order in which the first four are mentioned exactly agrees with their geographical sequence from east to west.’"

"On my return to India . . . a survey of any remains of ancient occupations along the dry river-bed of the Ghaggar or Hakra, which passes from the easternmost Panjab through the States of Bikaner and Bahawalpur down to Sind, seemed attractive. Traditional Indian belief recognizes in this well-marked bed the course of the sacred Sarasvatī, once carrying its abundant waters down to the ocean and since antiquity ‘lost’ in desert sands... the Ghaggar was ‘still known as the Sarsuti (the Hindi derivative of Sarasvatī) [which] passes the sacred sites of Kurukshetra near Thanesar, a place of Hindu pilgrimage’... ‘the width of its dry bed within Bikaner territory [that is, downstream of Hanumangarh]; over more than 100 miles [160 km], it is nowhere less than 2 miles [3.2 km] and in places 4 miles [6.4 km] or more’... ‘The large number of these ancient sites contrasts strikingly with the very few small villages still on the same ground.’..."

"In at least three passages of the Rigveda mentioning the Sarasvatī, a river corresponding to the present Sarsuti and Ghaggar is meant. For this we have conclusive evidence in the famous hymn, the ‘Praise of the rivers’ (Nadistuti) which, with a precision unfortunately quite exceptional in Vedic texts, enumerates the Sarasvati correctly between the Yamuna (Jumna) in the east and the Sutudri or Sutlej in the west... ‘of old sites on its banks’ would ‘be helpful to the student of early Indian history, still so much obscured by the want of reliable records and the inadequacy of archaeological evidence.’"

"A ‘popular tradition [that] recognizes the place where a ferry service is supposed to have crossed the river to Mathula on the opposite bank, a distance of more than 3 miles’—or 5 km, but of course without a drop of water between the two banks! ‘Still more striking, perhaps,’ he continued, ‘is the name of Pattan-munara, the “Minar of the ferry”, borne by an old site in Bahawalpur territory which is similarly believed to mark a ferrying place across the Hakra, the bed of which is here, if anything, still wider.’"

"‘levels between the sand ridges of the Cholistan which unmistakably represent an ancient winding bed of the Sutlej, that once joined the Hakra between Walar and Binjor’."

"Close to the foot of the southern extremity of the hill is a rock which has from ancient times received worship as an embodiment of Ganesa... From regard for the pious king the god is said to have then turned his face from west to east so as to behold the new city. ... In fact, if we are to believe Jonariija, the rock-image has changed its position yet a second time. This Chronicler relates that Bhimasvamin from disgust at the iconoclasm of Sikandar Butshikast has finally turned his back on the city."

"Blocks measuring up to sixteen feet in length, with a width and thickness equally imposing, were no convenient materials for the builders of Muhammadan Ziarats, Hammams, etc., who have otherwise done so much to efface the remains of ancient structures in Srinagar."

"The name Martanda, in the form of Mnrtand or Matan, still attaches to the ruins though they have long ago ceaaed to be an object of religious interest. King Kalasa had sought this great fane at the approach of death, and expired at the feet of the sacred image (a.d. 1089). Harsa, his son, respected this temple in the course of the ruthless confiscations to which he subjected the other rich shrines of the country. Subsequently, in Kalhaua's time the great quadrangular courtyard of the temple, with its lofty walls and colonnades, was used as a fortification. The destruction of the sacred image is ascribed to Sikandar Butshikast."

"Stein was essentially a geographer and an explorer and is to be admired for his indomitable courage and spirit of adventure in undertaking hazardous journeys through difficult terrain. He discovered a large number of Chalcolithic and related sites in the Great Indian Desert and the entire reach of the Indo-Iranian borderlands, covering Northern and Southern Baluchistan and a good part of Iran. He was a pioneer and a pathfinder and was to Indian protohistoric archaeology what Alexander Cunningham was to Indian historical archaeology."

"...These men and their party had overseen an unprecedented centralization of power in the federal government as a means of fighting and winning the Civil War. It is worth remembering, especially in America’s current political circumstances in the early 21st century, that these men of the first Republican Party vehemently believed in government."

"The first American republic, created out of revolution in the late 18th century, was in effect destroyed. A new, second republic took its place, given a violent birth in the emancipation of four million slaves and the re-crafting of the U. S. Constitution in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Those Amendments—ending legal slavery forever, sanctifying birthright citizenship and establishing “equal protection of the law,” and creating black male suffrage—in effect re-made the United States Constitution. This comprised a second American revolution."

"The death toll, the sheer sense of human loss experienced in the war, North and South, among blacks and whites, left a profound and haunting pall on American society and culture for generations to come. The old, official count of Civil War dead relied upon for a century and a half was approximately 620,000. According to some remarkable new research, as many as 750,000 American soldiers and sailors may have died in the conflict, the majority from disease. Approximately 1.2 million were wounded, including perhaps 30-40,000 northern amputees (there are no equivalent numbers for Southerners) who struggled with life and livelihood well into the late nineteenth century. There is no reasonable count of civilian deaths, nor of the numbers of freed slaves who perished in the struggle for their own emancipation. Research now suggests that a quarter of all freedmen who made it to contraband camps operated by the Union forces died in the process. Based on the military death count alone, per capita, if the Civil War were fought in the United States today with its ten-fold greater population, 7.5 million soldiers would die. For most Americans that is an unthinkable toll, but such was the equivalence for their kinfolk in the 1860s. Whenever Americans have been compelled to face and understand experiences of great loss and suffering—the World Wars, the Great Depression, the attacks of 9/11—they have returned to the Civil War-era for touchstones of understanding."

"A significant segment of American society hates the President [Barack Obama] and cannot seem to abide a black family living in the White House."

"(everyone should read:) Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass is probably the best biography I have ever read. If you want to understand America, you have to understand Douglass. He is one of the true founding fathers of this country, someone who helped America see what it was, and who helped direct it towards what he believed it could one day be."

"...There was also a feeling among many clergymen that scholarship somehow threatens religion. Even Jonathan Edwards, himself a profound scholar, took the colleges to task for failing to inculcate piety. The persistence of such a view is seen in the sustained effort of the nineteenth-century academic orators to refute the charge that learning and religion are at necessary odds. No note is more often struck than this in the hundreds of commencement orations and other academic addresses that I have had the somewhat doubtful pleasure of reading."

"The culture hero of our business civilization was the self-made man, a man of action, not one of trained intellect."

"American respect for business, and the businessman's inadequate appreciation of the intellectual, have by tradition been pretty generally taken for granted. One historian has gone so far as to say that whenever business sits in the driver's seat, as it did in the 1920's and as it does today, the distrust of the intellectual is both epidemic and dominant."

"The ivory tower can become a pretty dull place, and rather unproductive, too."

"While appraising all aspects of the past, including myths, we must at the same time uphold the critical function that is the basis of all scholarship, indeed, of civilization itself. For this we also need to recognize clearly the sources of irrationality in history, in our culture, in ourselves."

"My hands-down favorite writer is my friend , and that's in large part because much of what I've learned about writing over the last couple of decades has come in the form of gifts from him. Carlo is an apostle of craft, skill, mastery, and work. He writes great prose, to be sure, but he has also taught me about blocking, outlining, editing, structure—all those things I pretended to do, but never actually did. Talking to Carlo, I am always reminded that craft itself produces ideas and insights, unbidden thoughts that transcend the nuts and bolts work. That's why we tell our students that writing is thinking, and that thinking may well be incomplete without writing."

"Writing is a learned and practiced craft, not a work of magic or mystery. Indeed, the magic happens when you are practicing the craft. Literary talent may be distributed unevenly, but no one is “born” a writer."

"The situation of the Muslims of China was very different. They were geographically remote from the Muslim heartlands— in contrast to the Muslims of India, whose contacts were so close that to a large extent they transacted their affairs in Persian... The result was the appearance of a Muslim literature in Chinese that pressed the argument that Confucian and Muslim values were fully compatible, if not identical. Thus an inscription purportedly dating from 742, but likely to have been forged by Chinese Muslims in the Ming period, says of Confucius and Muḥammad that “their language differed, yet their principles agreed.”... Nor is Islamic-­Confucian syncretism likely to have cut much ice with the Chinese elite. One prominent Chinese Muslim author was able to persuade some Confucian scholars to write laudatory prefaces for his books, and the title of his heavily Confucianized work on Muslim ritual found a place in an imperial compendium of 1773–­1782. But the work was placed in the company of books that “contained little that was praiseworthy and much that was contemptible,” and an editorial comment, while conceding that the author’s literary style “is actually rather elegant,” maintained that “the clever literary ornamentation does him no good” for the simple reason that “Islam is fundamentally far-­fetched and absurd.”"

"With regard to the formal structure of the tradition, we need not beat about the bush. In obvious ways the Islamic heritage lends itself so easily to fundamentalization that it could almost be said to invite it."

"One is that, even before the rise of Islamism, there were indications that leftism did not in general fare as well in the Islamic world as it did in other Third World regions. There was a sense at the time that the presence of Islam displaced the political spectrum to the right. One effect of this was a certain opportunistic reticence on the part of leftists in the Islamic world when it came to the manifestation of antireligious sentiments."

"There are several reasons why Muslims make good enemies in the Indian context. One is that Muslims, whether they like it or not, are historically identified with the invaders who did most to destroy Hindu culture. Of course, not all the Muslim elite in India espoused this program assiduously, and many did not pursue it at all or indeed did the opposite. But there was enough rhetoric of destruction, and enough actual destruction, to lend support to a deep sense of Hindu grievance."

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

"It is notoriously difficult to convey the proper impression of the frontiers of mathematics to nonspecialists. Ultimately the difficulty stems from the fact that mathematics is an easier subject than the other sciences. Consequently, many of the important primary problems of the subject‍—‌that is, problems which can be understood by an intelligent outsider‍—‌have either been solved or carried to a point where an indirect approach is clearly required. The great bulk of pure mathematical research is concerned with secondary, tertiary, or higher-order problem, the very statement of which can hardly be understood until one has mastered a great deal of technical mathematics."

"Early in his college days, Minsky had had the good fortune to encounter Andrew Gleason. Gleason was only six years older than Minsky, but he was already recognized as one of the world’s premier problem-solvers in mathematics; he seemed able to solve any well-formulated mathematics problem almost instantly... “I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could know so much mathematics,” Minsky told me. “But the most remarkable thing about him was his plan. When we were talking once, I asked him what he was doing. He told me that he was working on Hilbert’s fifth problem.” Gleason said he had a plan that consisted of three steps, each of which he thought would take him three years to work out. Our conversation must have taken place in 1947, when I was a sophomore. Well, the solution took him only about five more years... I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could understand the subject well enough to have such a plan and to have an estimate of the difficulty in filling in each of the steps. Now that I’m older, I still can’t understand it. Anyway, Gleason made me realize for the first time that mathematics was a landscape with discernible canyons and mountain passes, and things like that. In high school, I had seen mathematics simply as a bunch of skills that were fun to master—but I had never thought of it as a journey and a universe to explore. No one else I knew at that time had that vision, either."

"The story of Hypatia has greatly affected the collective imagination, even outside the circle of experts. She is a scientist who is killed also because a woman who was not in her place, had a public life, spoke in public and took public positions. We must never be sure that the development of science is unstoppable. Blindly trusting in the inevitability of the need that technological development has for scientific development can be a tragic mistake. The Romans preserved Greek technology without much concern for Greek science, and the Christian fanatics led by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria calmly tore Hypatia to pieces without caring at all about the long-term consequences, rather rejoicing in the disappearance of profane knowledge considered useless, if not harmful."

"As quoted in Laura Martellini, The Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi and feminicides: «The mathematics of the fifth century Hypatia victim of a patriarchal mentality that still survives today" (28 November 2023)"

"The existence of God cannot be used as any scientific hypothesis: it is something different that transcends science. [...] I would be a terrible theologian if I tried to do an experiment to prove the existence of God, and a terrible scientist if I tried to explain my experimental data by hypothesizing the existence of God. [...] I'm always annoyed when people ask me about my religious opinions in interviews. I don't think they ever ask that of footballers, singers, models, categories for which I have the utmost respect. Interviewers implicitly assume that scientists possess privileged knowledge of God, but this is not true."

"From the religious books of ancient Egypt we learn that the power possessed by a priest or man who was skilled in the knowledge and working of magic was believed to be almost boundless. By pronouncing certain words or names of power in the proper manner and in the proper tone of voice he could heal the sick, and cast out the evil spirits which caused pain and suffering in those who were diseased, and restore the dead to life, and bestow upon the dead man the power to transform the corruptible into an incorruptible body, wherein the soul might live to all eternity. His words enabled human beings to assume divers forms at will, and to project their souls into animals and other creatures; and in obedience to his commands, inanimate figures and pictures became living beings and things which hastened to perform his behests. The powers of nature acknowledged his might, and wind and rain, storm and tempest, river and sea, and disease and death worked evil and ruin upon his foes, and upon the enemies of those who were provided with the knowledge of the words which he had wrested from the gods of heaven, and earth, and the underworld."

"As each great power has risen in the ranks, boosted by its expanding material base, it has tended to devote more and more of its resources to military protection – to guard its interests, to deter (or defeat) jealous rivals. Affording that protection is not such a great problem when the home economy is growing swiftly; when, however, the nation concerned becomes "mature" and its growth rates slow down, it becomes ever more difficult to maintain its extensive military and strategic obligations in the face of newer, faster-growing challengers. The faltering great power thus runs the risk of what I have termed "imperial overstretch", a widening gap between its global interests and obligations and its own capacity to defend them all."

"Military power is sustained, in the final result, by economic power. If the latter crumbles, so eventually will the former."

"The above remarks about conservatism could be made with equal or even greater force about the Mogul Empire. Despite the sheer size of the kingdom at its height and the military genius of some of its emperors, despite the brilliance of its courts and the craftsmanship of its luxury products, despite even a sophisticated banking and credit network, the system was weak at its core. A conquering Muslim elite lay on top of a vast mass of poverty-stricken peasants chiefly adhering to Hinduism. In the towns themselves there were very considerable numbers of merchants, bustling markets, and an attitude towards manufacture, trade, and credit among Hindu business families which would make them excellent examples of Weber's Protestant ethic. As against this picture of an entrepreneurial society just ready for economic "takeoff" before it was a victim of British imperialism, there are the gloomier portrayals of the many indigenous retarding factors in Indian life. The sheer rigidity of Hindu religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amounts of foodstuffs were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions, a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the caste system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and restricted the market; and the influence wielded over Indian local rulers by the Brahman priests meant that this obscurantism was effective at the highest level. Here were the social checks of the deepest sort to any attempts at radical change. Small wonder that later many Britons, having first plundered and then tried to govern India in accordance with Utilitarian principles, finally left with the feeling that the country was still a mystery to them."

"Imperial overstretch has rarely occurred because a great power had too little military force; on the contrary, it was likely still to possess massive forces and at times to deploy them a long way from home. The real problem, it seems, has not been the force-projection capacities of the current number one, but a failure to recognise that long-term wealth and strength depend on the non-military dimensions of national power and on making hard political decisions on the home front."

"The emperors, kings, prime ministers and presidents of great powers have always preferred the heady world of diplomacy, war and international affairs to the unglamorous realm of fiscal reform, educational change and domestic renewal. That is understandable, since they will go down in history as leaders of this or that spectacular demonstration of the country's still-powerful military capacity. It is left to later generations to pay the price."

"The Enterprise is a vessel that defies the landlubber's imagination. It is more than 1,100ft long and its flight deck is 250ft across. It is as high as a 20-storey building... But this super-dreadnought never travels alone. It is always accompanied, at the very least, by an Aegis-type cruiser, a large surface ship designed to shoot down incoming missiles; by a bevy of frigates and destroyers to protect it from enemy submarines; by a lurking hunter-killer submarine or two; and by some supply vessels and other specialised craft. Marine troops and their helicopters will be in the task force. In offensive and defensive terms, this is a behemoth... What is more, no equivalent concentration of power to a US carrier task force exists in the world; the few UK, French and Indian carriers are minuscule by comparison, the Russian ones rusting away."

"The US possesses 12 such carriers (another, the USS Ronald Reagan, is to join the fleet soon), each with the attendant group of complementary warships. There are also smaller carriers designed, not for open-ocean combat against all, but to take powerful Marine Corps battalions ashore. This array of force is staggering. Were it ever assembled en masse the result would be the largest concentration of naval and aerial force the world would have seen."

"Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap, Britain's army was much smaller than European armies, and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies – right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy."

"The fascination emanating as usual from the historical material itself prevailed over any desire of practical or moral application and, needless to say, preceded any afterthought."

"The antithesis served the Anonymous, it is true, to observe very strictly the inherent difference between the God and the king; but it served him also to blur that line of distinction and to show where the difference between "God by nature" and "god by grace" ended; that is, in the case of potestas, of power. Essence and substance of power are claimed to be equal in both God and king, no matter whether that power be owned by nature or only acquired by grace."

"That the phrase actually originated in the Hispana is obvious for a simple reason: only in that collection do we find a textual corruption of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon at which one of the bishops modestly said that God imperatorem erexit ad zelum [i.e. fidei]. In other words, a scribe copying the canons of Chalcedon misread the text and changed ad zelum into ad celum; and this erroneous reading must have reached, perhaps through the channels of Pseudo-Isidorus, the Norman Anonymous for whom even that great forgery in favor of the hierarchy could turn into grist brought to his royalist mill. This reading is merely an error, though an error remarkable by itself, since it shows how easily any extravagant exaltation of the imperial power could flow from the pen of a scribe in those centuries."

"It appears relevant to the general subject of this study, and also otherwise worth our while, to inspect more closely the varieties of royal duplications which Shakespeare has unfolded in the three bewildering central scenes of Richard II. The duplications, all one, and all simultaneously active, in Richard — "Thus play I in one person many people" (V. v.31) — are those potentially present in the King, the Fool, and the God. They dissolve, perforce, in the Mirror. Those three prototypes of "twin-birth" intersect and overlap and interfere with each other continuously."

"The jurists had claimed that the king's body politic is utterly void of "natural Defects and Imbecilities." Here, however, "Imbecility" seems to hold sway. And yet, the very bottom has not been reached. Each scene, progressively, designates a new low. "King body natural" in the first scene, and "Kingly Fool" in the second: with those two twin-born beings there is associated, in the half-sacramental abdication scene, the twin-born deity as an even lower estate. For the "Fool" marks the transition from "King" to "God," and nothing could be more miserable, it seems, than the God in the wretchedness of man."

"Over against his lost outward kingship he sets an inner kingship, makes his true kingship to retire to inner man, to soul and mind and "regal thoughts": You may my glories and my state depose, But not my briefs, still am I king of those. (IV.i.192ff)"

"The features as reflected by the looking-glass betray that he is stripped of every possibility of a second or super-body — of the pompous body politic of king, of the God-likeness of the Lord's deputy elect, of the follies of the fool, and even of the most human griefs residing in inner man. The splintering mirror means, or is, the breaking part of any possible duality. All those facets are reduced to one: to the banal face and insignificant physis of a miserable man, a physis now void of any metaphysis whatsoever. It is both less and more than Death. It is the demise of Richard and the rise of a new body natural."

"A hundred years or more of Christ-centered monastic piety have affected also the image of rulership. In fact, the unique Reichenau miniature is the most powerful pictorial display of what may be called "liturgical kingship" — a kingship centered in the God-man rather than in God the Father. As a result, the Reichenau artist ventured to transfer the Ottonian emperor also the God-man's "two natures in one person."

"In late antique art, we often find the halo bestowed on such figures as might impersonate a supra-individual idea or general notion. This special mark of distinction indicated that the figure was meant to represent in every respect a continuum, something permanent and sempiternal beyond the contingencies of time and corruption."

"In other words, whenever we capitalize a notion and, in the English language, even change the gender from neuter to feminine, we actually are "haloing" the word or the notion and are indicating its sempiternity as an idea or power."

"As it happened, such considerations played a decisive role and the eminent linguist M. Emeneau wrote (1954: 282): “At some time in the second millennium BC a band or bands of speakers of an Indo-European language, later to be called Sanskrit, entered India over the north-west passes. This is our linguistic doctrine which has been held now for more than a century and a half. There seems to be no reason to distrust the arguments for it...”"

"As far back as the 3rd or 4th millennium B.C. and probably much earlier still, India was in possession of a highly developed civilization with large and populous cities."

"So in India some three to seven thousand years ago there were peoples possessing a technology sufficiently advanced to support a dense population."

"So putting the evidence from archaeology, literature, and history together, we reach the conclusion that before the Christian era India had a substantial population, first because of its advanced technology and second because of the fertile environment of the application of this technology."

"Although there were mass conversions, the country was too vast, the invaders too few, and the volume of immigration too small to change the social complex… India, therefore, never became a Muslim nation, but remained simply a Hindu country in which Muslims were numerous."

"In six decades (1881-1941)… at no census have the Muslims failed to improve their percentage and the Hindus failed to lose…” [It is due not only to the] “proportion of Muslim women married, but those who are married also have a higher fertility.”"

"However, the seed of the debate on the differential population growth rates of the Hindus and Muslims was planted in the undivided India itself. Kingsley Davis, an eminent demographer, was one of the first to raise a debate on the Hindu-Muslim population growth rates in the sub- continent. In his famous book “The Population of India and Pakistan” (1951), he presented before the world the fact that Muslim fertility was higher than the Hindu fertility. For instance, the decline in the proportion of the Hindus from 75.1 per cent to 72.9 per cent in between the censuses of 1881 and 1901 (Davis, 1951) created strong reaction and fear among the Hindus that the Muslims would become the majority population in India in the future. Numerous research and review studies have been done on this area since then. But there seems to be no end to this highly debated topic and it still remains a very popular area for research studies among the research scholars and population scientists."

"The people as a source of sovereign power are in truth only occasional partners in the constitutional minuet danced for most of the time by Parliament and the political party in power."

"A government above the law is a menace to be defeated."

"There is no doubt for me that making anthropology enter the public sphere and participate in democratic conversations is desirable and even crucial, especially in the hard times contemporary societies are experiencing. To be clear in this respect, I consider that the threat that they face comes less from crime, terrorist attacks, the influx of refugees and migrants, or other real issues to which they are confronted and which I certainly do not want to lessen, than from the responses they offer to these issues as they are dictated by both fear and the political exploitation of fear – which serve to justify the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States, the oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the persecution of Shias in Saudi Arabia, the pogroms against Zimbabweans in South Africa, the repression of Muslim minorities in East Asia, or the rejection of migrants and refugees in Europe – Sweden being, along with Germany, a notable exception to this disgraceful trend of recent years. “A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear,” wrote Clifford Geertz, whom I had the honour to succeed at the Institute for Advanced Study. The aphorism is especially relevant if we substitute “fear” with “politics of fear” – although to destroy it unreasonably exceeds the anthropologists’ power."

"Having earlier conducted some research on mental health issues, I was solicited in 2008 by the health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, to chair the national committee on suicide, but having observed how academics had served as “spoils of war” – the term in use – by the right-wing government of the time to legitimize its policies, I politely declined the proposal."

"Commentators, when they exist, whether on paper, on waves, or increasingly online, are not representative or even indicative of the public, although they can be influential."

"The world as we know it could be different and may therefore be changed."

"Speaking truth to power, as the motto goes – whether this power is academic or political – may be a perilous exercise."

"Indeed, self-censorship is probably more common than censorship, at least in democratic contexts."

"In 1895 the writer became interested in the study of the . Breeding-cage experiments with some detail later on in this paper early convinced him that is the favorite food of this species. Even in the presence of kitchen garbage, , and , flies in confinement oviposited exclusively on horse manure. In the absence of the latter substance but in the presence of the others, he noted egg-laying on decaying fruit and on cow dung but the resultant larvæ failed to develop. He considered himself warranted in the statement that probably 95 percent of the flies found in cities come from the piles of horse manure everywhere so prevalent, especially in the vicinity of stables."

"As is well known, the mosquito-pest is by no means confined to the tropics or even to temperate regions. The stories which the from and other Alaskan localities tell of the abundance and ferocity of Alaskan mosquitoes, are hardly to be matched by any mosquito story which I have heard, historical or otherwise. Many of my friends in the and the who have formed members of summer parties for survey work in Alaska, have come back to this country with a much stronger idea of the importance of the practical study of insects than they had when they started, their acquaintance with mosquitoes having become so intimate and their knowledge of their ferocity having reached such a pitch that the first question which they ask on returning is: "If I have to go up there next summer, what under the sun can I do to keep from being bled to death by mosquitoes?" They state that they never experienced or even imagined anything in the mosquito line quite equal to those found in Alaska. Mr. W. C. Henderson, of Philadelphia, says, concerning Alaskan mosquitoes, "They existed in countless millions, driving us to the verge of suicide or insanity.""

"For many centuries humanity has endured the annoyance of mosquitoes without making any intelligent effort to prevent it except in the use of smudges, preparations applied to the skin, and in removal from localities of abundance. And it is only within comparatively recent years that widespread community work against mosquitoes has been undertaken, this having resulted almost directly from the discoveries concerning the carriage of disease by these insects. As obvious a procedure as it might seem to be, the abolition of mosquito-breeding places is a comparatively new idea. The treatment of breeding places with oil to destroy the larval forms is, however, by no means recent. As early as 1812 the writer of a work published in London entitled "Omniana or Horæ Otiosiores" suggested that by pouring oil upon water the number of mosquitoes may be diminished. It is stated that in the middle of the nineteenth century was used in France in this way, while in the French quarter in oil was placed in water tanks before the , the idea having possibly come France to New Orleans or vice versa."

"was a resident of , and was greatly interested in the so-called of that city. The Institute had founded a museum that contained large collections in natural history brought home through the years by the famous Salem ships. Putnam induced his fellow students, , , , and to work at these collections, Morse on the shells, Packard on the , Hyatt on the s and on geology, and Putnam on the vertebrates and ethnology. Whether they went to Salem to live a year or so earlier or later, makes little difference, but, when gave the Institute $140,000 and the well known was founded in 1867, all of them but Verrill (who had gone to , were placed in definite charge of these subjects in the Museum."

"They [female primates] tolerate other breeding females if food is plentiful, but chase them away when monogamy is the optimal strategy."

"has nearly four million square miles ; has 1,700 ; has 700. Yet this tiny country has given us an art which we, with it and all that the world has done since it for our models, have equalled perhaps, but not surpassed. It has given us the staple of our vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge. Politics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history—these are all Greek words. It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her culture thence. Young Romans completed their education in the Greek schools. Roman orators learnt their trade from Greek rhetoricians. Roman proconsuls on their way to the East stopped to spend a few days talking to the successors of Plato and Aristotle in the and . Roman aristocrats imported Greek philosophers to live in their families."

"A man walking down from to passes the . If it is the evening, a dramatic performance is probably taking place inside. It may be a tragedy, or some form of comedy. If it is a musical comedy and he enters, he will see elaborate scenery and a play which may open with a prologue and which is partly composed of dialogue between the various characters, partly of songs in various sung by a chorus to the accompaniment of an orchestra. As the words in italics indicate, our imaginary passer-by will have seen, though he may not have suspected it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but he would be looking at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home."

"Ages are not taken at their own valuation by posterity, and the achievements which they view with most complacency often appear to their successors negligible or even ridiculous. It was so in Greece. Aeschylus expected to be remembered not as a poet, but as a combatant at . speaks as if the greatness of Athens lay in its empire. Much of which it is proud is forgotten by its successors. Much of which it is proud is forgotten by its successors. Whole epochs which were well satisfied with themselves are found in the sequel to matter nothing to the world, and to have made no contribution to its progress. Two hundred years hence our own age may be regarded as one that possessed, for its time, considerable material civilization but very little else, a substantial body and a soul which died from fatty degeneration,"

"My mother's kiss made me a painter."

"Gimbutas, following most recent Russian work, has departed from Childe, to the extent of deriving the Kurgan cultures from the steppes on the Lower Volga and farther east (…) While linguistic opinion has been moving in the direction of putting the Indo-European homeland in the region of the Vistula, Oder or Elbe, archaeological opinion is now putting it in the Lower Volga steppe and regions east of the Caspian Sea."

"As your country grows in years, you must also cause it to grow in science, literature, arts and refinement. It will be for you to develope and multiply its resources, to check the faults of manners as they rise, and to advance the cause of industry, temperance, moderation, justice, morals and religion, all around you. On you too, will devolve the duty which has been too long neglected, but which cannot with impunity be neglected much longer, of providing for the mitigation, and (is it too much to hope for in North-Carolina?) for the ultimate extirpation of the worst evil that afflicts the Southern part of our Confederacy. Full well do you know to what I refer, for on this subject there is, with all of us, a morbid sensitiveness which gives warning even of an approach to it. Disguise the truth as we may, and throw the blame where we will, it is Slavery which, more than any other cause, keeps us back in the career of improvement. It stifles industry and represses enterprize—it is fatal to economy and providence—it discourages skill—impairs our strength as a community, and poisons morals at the fountain head. How this evil is to be encountered, how subdued, is indeed a difficult and delicate enquiry, which this is not the time to examine, nor the occasion to discuss. I felt, however, that I could not discharge my duty, without referring to this subject, as one which ought to engage the prudence moderation and firmness of those who, sooner or later, must act decisively upon it."

"Carolina! Carolina! Heaven's blessings attend her! While we live, we will cherish and love and defend her; Though the scorner may sneer at, and witlings defame her, Our hearts swell with gladness, whenever we name her. Hurrah! Hurrah! The Old North State for ever! Hurrah! Hurrah! the good Old North State! Though she envies not others their merited glory, Say, whose name stands the foremost in Liberty’s story? Though too true to herself, e’er to crouch to oppression, Who can yield to just rule more loyal submission? Hurrah, &c. Plain and artless her sons, but whose doors open faster, At the knock of the stranger, or the tale of disaster? How like to the rudeness of their dear native mountains, With rich ore in their bosoms, and life in their fountains? Hurrah, &c. And her daughters, the Queen of the forest resembling, So graceful, so constant, yet to gentlest breath trembling, And true light wood at heart, let the match be applied them, How they kindle and flame? Oh, none know but who’ve tried them. Hurrah, &c. Then let all who love us, love the land that we live in, (As happy a region as on this side of Heaven,) Where Plenty and Freedom, Love and Peace smile before us, Raise aloud, raise together, the heart-thrilling chorus! Hurrah, &c."

"Well-behaved women seldom make history."

"So what do people see when they read that well-behaved women rarely make history? Do they imagine good-time girls in stiletto heels or do-good girls carrying clipboards and passing petitions? Do they envision an out-of-control hobbyist or a single mother taking down a drunk in a bar? I suspect that it depends on where they stand themselves."

"Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make history when someone notices."

"An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women."

"All over Russia princes are as plenty as pickpockets in London."

"Take from the air every aëroplane; from the roads every automobile; from the country every train; from the cities every electric light; from ships even wireless apparatus; from oceans all cables; from the land all wires; from shops all motors; from office buildings every elevator, telephone, and typewriter; let epidemics spread at will; let major surgery be impossible—all this and vastly more, the bondage of ignorance, where knowledge now makes us free, would be the terrible catastrophe if the tide of time should but ebb to the childhood days of men still living! ... Therefore, whoever desires progress and prosperity, whoever would advance humanity to a higher plane of civilization, must further the work of the scientist in every way he possibly can."

"Modern civilization depends on science...James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment...narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life...science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity."

"# Science is constantly, systematically and inexorably revisionary. It is a self-correcting process and one that is self-destroying of its own errors..."

"# A related trait of science is its destruction of idols, destruction of the gods men live by... Science has no absolute right or absolute justice... To live comfortably with science it is necessary to live with a dynamically changing system of concepts... it has a way of weakening old and respected bonds..."

"# Not only are the tenets of science constantly subject to challenge and revision, but its prophets are under challenge too..."

"# Further, the findings of science have an embarrassing way of turning out to be relevant to the customs and to the civil laws of men—requiring these customs and laws also to be revised..."

"# Certainly we have seen spectacular changes in the concept of private property and of national borders as we have moved into the space age..."

"# Moreover, the pace of technological advance gravely threatens the bountiful and restorative power of nature to resist modification..."

"# Another trait of science that leads to much hostility or misunderstanding by the non-scientist is the fact that science is practiced by a small elite... (which) has cultural patterns discernibly different from those of the rest of society..."

"# The trait that to me seems the most socially important about science, however, is that it is a major source of man's discontent with the status quo..."

"The successful launching of the Sputnik was a demonstration of one of the highest scientific and technological achievements of man—a tantalizing invitation both to the militarist in search of ever more devastating means of destruction and to the astronomer searching for new means of carrying his instruments away from their earthbound environment."

"Sir Alan Gardiner’s 1961 Egypt of the Pharaohs devoted a whole chapter to the dating problem. ‘In spite of all defects,’ he wrote, ‘this division into dynasties has taken so firm a root in the literature of Egyptology that there is little chance of its ever being abandoned. In the forms in which the book has reached us, there are inaccuracies of the most glaring kind…Africanus and Eusabius often do not agree; for example Africanus assigns nine kings to Dyn. XXII, while Eusabius only has three. Sometimes all that is vouchsafed to us is the number of kings in a dynasty and their city of origin…the lengths of reigns frequently differ in the two versions…the reconstructed Manetho remains full of imperfections…. Nonetheless, [it]still dominates our studies.’ Despite decades of archaeological discoveries and scholarly research since then, his conclusion is still relevant. ‘We are dealing with a civilisation thousands of years old and of which only tiny fragments have survived.’"

"s throve at the s of kings, and sometimes their advice was taken even by him whose very act was held to be under special divine direction. It would be a great mistake to think that the astrologer was maintained for the amusement of king and court, like the . His utterances were taken most seriously, and the principles of his art were so generally accepted as to become the commonplaces of the thought and the conversation of daily life. In 1305, for instance, who certain s urged to return to Rome, they reminded him that every planet was most powerful in its own house."

"Instead of describing the personal appearance of the general and statesman, , in his biography of that worthy, Plutarch referred his readers to a bronze statue of him at Rome opposite the . But to-day the statue has disappeared, and the same is true of most of the manners and customs of the distant past, which were once too familiar for historians to think it worth while to mention them to their readers."

"There is no more familiar, and possibly no more important, figure in the history of Latin learning during the twelfth century that Peter Abelard who flourished at its beginning. His career, as set forth in his own words, illustrated educational conditions in at that time. His brilliant success as a lecturer on logic and theology at Paris reveals the in embryo. His pioneer work, ', set the fashion for the standard method of presentation employed in ."

"Many accept the date, July 19, 4241, for the origin of the . The s had a day of twenty-four hours, a month of thirty days, and a year of three hundred and sixty-five days made up of twelve months and five extra days which were regarded as unlucky. The division of the month into three ten-day periods seems traceable to the . Their year began on what for us would be July 19, when the star or first appeared on the eastern horizon simultaneously with the rising sun. This was furthermore about the time of the which meant so much to the prosperity of the land."

"I was mystified one morning in an outpatient department by the numerous and vague complaints of an Italian boy—who, incidentally, neglected to mention his chief trouble—and in order to temporize he was told to return with a "24-hour specimen". The next morning he arrived in a Ford car with sundry members of his family and six jugs containing 20 litres of pale, clear ! I need scarcely remark that this was my first experience with ."

"Born of pioneering stock, with three generations of physicians behind him, it is not surprising that should turn the full force of his tremendous energies to charting a little known field — the human brain. After attending Yale College and , he went to the where, under the influence of , Osler and , he made himself eminent as a and as a leader in the reform of . Cushing was one of the earliest in the United States to use s; the first to take routinely during surgical operations and in general practice. The use of the in brain operations was first developed by him."

"I have chosen to place ... and ... side by side ... Both men were incredibly industrious., Osler's output running to 1,195 books and papers, as indicated in Maude Abbott's bibliography, ... while Choulant published sixty separate books (see Appendix IV); his journal contributions have never been counted or collected."

"John F. Fulton was one of the leading figures internationally in and history of medicine between the early 1930s and 1960. Working at the laboratory of physiology at Yale University, he was a pioneer in the study of the functional localisation of the cerebral cortex in primates. His 1938 treatise Physiology of the nervous system was a milestone in the development of neurophysiology. Fulton created a working environment at the laboratory where training was provided to important scientists who later directed centres in their home countries. He stood out as speaker, editor, communicator, and member of several committees, and established many links with foreign figures, including the Spanish physicians , Jaume Pi-Sunyer, , , and Francisco Guerra. Fulton was a student of and Harvey Cushing and showed a special interest for the world of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. A great bibliophile, he dedicated the last years of his short but intense life to the history of medicine, publishing studies on Michael Servetus."

"Science is the art of understanding nature."

"American capitalism of 1830 to 1860 was a riot of extravagance. Hundreds of those who glistened in New York and Boston in the 1840's are forgotten. A few families—, —managed to maintain continuity, but they were few. The number who went down to ruin invited a chronicler equal to Dickens."

"Later practitioners improved upon Mitchell and Stoughton only by extending the list of sins, by going into greater detail. Year by year the stock enumeration grew, and once a new sin was added to the series it kept its place in subsequent editions."

"By the middle of the twentieth century, the world had accepted Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, published in 1851, as an indubitable masterpiece of the nineteenth, even though that world became aware of it only a generation ago."

"deserves credit for his courageous advocacy of the of Ohio, probably more than for his contributions to literature: his trade monthly, published from 1854 t0 1861, Cozzens' Wine Press, is a neglected classic which provides a charming insight into the amenities of the table in a society which devoted considerable care to that department."

"Perry Miller died fifty years ago today at age fifty-eight. After his death, letters of appreciation from friends and former students flooded the desk where Elizabeth Miller was working to complete her husband’s The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. In their letters, students expressed gratitude, friends offered Elizabeth their support, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confessed that Miller’s death, coming on the heels of , had left him in a deep depression. “Perry, as you well know,” wrote Schlesinger, “was one of the first influences in my life.” “He was a superb teacher,” Schlesinger recalled. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a frequent correspondent of Miller’s and a careful reader of all Miller’s books, published an obituary for his friend in the '."

"Gothic art affords the greatest number and the best representations of animal forms. The great cathedrals, especially those of the Isle of France, where sculpture reached its highest point of excellence, are a sort of encyclopedia of the knowledge of the time."

"In higher organisms, the cells of an individual become greatly diversified despite their identity of . How such diversification is achieved and how supra-cellular organization then comes about have remained largely obscure. A new way of getting at theses questions was formulated in ; its purpose was to subject the pivotal genotype-phenotype relationship to experimental manipulation. The intact organism was taken to be the necessary framework for such an experimental study of gene expression, and the mouse, with its wide variety of available s, was easily the most promising vertebrate species. The plan was to make artificial mice: within each, cells with different, rather than identical, genotypes would be included. ... Certain kinds of had previously been extensively employed in studies with '. ... The first indication, in a mammal, of an admixture of genotypes came with 's discovery of erythrocyte mosaicism in fraternal cattle co-twins. ..."

"s owe their existence to a population of persistently proliferating s which probably originate from the normal generative cells of that ... Normal stem cells ordinarily tend to give rise to non-dividing terminally differentiated cellular progeny; malignant stem cells, on the other hand, suffer an impairment of differentiation. Early in embryonic life, stem cells are developmentally versatile; the earliest ones, e.g., s in the mouse, are , or individually capable of forming an entire organism. s are exceptional tumors in that they contain a multiplicity of tissues, a characteristic implying that their stem cells arise from cells more developmentally primitive than is the case in other malignancies."

"She made foundational discoveries and revolutionized many tools and techniques of that paved the way for tremendous progress in our understanding of cancer."

"Beatrice Mintz, known as “Bea” to her friends, was a developmental geneticist. ... Her pioneering work had a major impact on many different areas of science. She began her career addressing one of the most complex and fascinating questions of development: how the many different and diverse tissues in an organism are initiated and develop from a single fertilized egg. In the early 1960s Bea—at about the same time as in Poland and in Philadelphia—generated the first chimeric mice by combining early, genetically distinct, mouse embryos. She had contemplated this experiment for many years at the and began to work seriously on it after moving to (discussing the project with her colleagues) … And indeed, this manipulation of embryos was a breakthrough to a new era of experimental work in mammalian development. (Bea did not like the designation “chimera” because of its association with “monsters” in Greek mythology; she described these mice as “allophenic.”)"

"suffers from the drawback that it cannot with certainty distinguish between resemblances due to genetic affinity, on the other hand, and those which are the results of convergence or parallelism, on the other, and it possesses no trustworthy criterion, by which it can test the taxonomic significance of structural characters."

"The day has gone forever gone by when any one mind, however profound and comprehensive, can take all knowledge for its province. Increase of knowledge, like advance of civilization, necessarily brings with it a division of labor, and each of the great branches of science becomes more and more minutely divided and subdivided for the purposes of investigation. Such subdivision greatly enhances the efficiency of the individual worker, enabling him to concentrate his attention upon some problem of more or less limited scope, and, so far, it is advantageous. On the other hand, like most human devices, it has its drawbacks, and what is gained in one direction is apt to be lost in another. One great and growing evil is the subdiviision of knowledge which accompanies specialization of research."

"Only two or three years ago an expedition from the discovered a place in Wyoming where the lie directly upon those of the , thus fully confirming the inference as to the relative age of the two s which had long ago been drawn from the comparative study of their fossil mammals. The palæontological method of determining the geological date of the stratified rocks is thus an indispensable means of correlating the scattered exposures of the strata in widely separated regions and in different continents, it may be with thousands of miles of intervening ocean. The general principle employed is that close similarity of fossils in the rocks of the regions compared points to an approximately contemporaneous date of formation of those rocks. The principal must not, however, be applied in an offhand or uncritical manner, or it will lead to serious error."

"Among Scott's outstanding contributions to the study of evolution were two memoirs, both published in 1891, the first on ' and the second on ' and '. Besides the descriptive parts of these papers, the first included a list of what Scott considered the most important questions regarding evolution and the second attempted to answer these questions from the paleontological point of view."

"The 1940s and 1950s were marked by intense debates over the origin of drug resistance in microbes. ... Antibiotic resistance became a key issue among those disputing physiological (usually termed ‘’) vs. genetic ( and ) explanations of variation in . Postwar developments connected with the gave this debate a new political valence. Proponents of the weighed in with support for the genetic theory. However, certain features of drug resistance seemed inexplicable by mutation and selection, particularly the phenomenon of ‘multiple resistance’—the emergence of resistance in a single strain against several unrelated antibiotics. In the late 1950s, and his collaborators solved this puzzle by determining that resistance could be conferred by rather than . These could carry resistance to many antibiotics and seemed able to promote their own dissemination in bacterial populations. In the end, the vindication of the genetic view of drug resistance was accompanied by a recasting of the ‘gene’ to include extrachromosomal hereditary units carried on viruses and s."

"Laboratory instructions and recipes are sometimes edited into books with a wide circulation. Even in the late twentieth century, publications of this nature remained influential. For example, s from a 1980 summer course on at provided the basis for a bestselling laboratory manual by , and . Not only did the Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual become a standard reference for s (commonly called the ‘bible’), but also its recipes and clear instructions made gene cloning and technologies accessible to non-specialists. Consequently, this laboratory manual contributed to the rapid spread of genetic-engineering techniques throughout the , as well as in industry. As is often the case with how-to books, however, finding a way to update methods in this rapidly changing field posed a challenge, and various molecular-biology reference books had different ways of dealing with knowledge obsolescence. This paper explores the origins of this manual, its publication history, its reception and its rivals – as well as the more recent migration of such laboratory manuals to the Internet."

"There are many reasons to revisit the history of research on (TMV), beginning with the fact that it was the first virus to be identified and so marks the start of the field of . However, not every original example of a new biological category becomes a well-studied object in its own right ... As virology took off in the early twentieth century, TMV did become one of the best-studied viruses and remained at the forefront of the field. It was used to elucidate basic knowledge about the nature of viruses and served as a in as well as agriculture, where it had emerged. The fact that the first recognized virus came from plants—although es were rapidly identified—meant that virology was, from the outset, highly comparative ... Literature on the origins of often privileges and the contributions of the ... Yet early work with TMV inspired Max Delbrück and other early molecular biologists to take up the study of bacteriophages. Moreover, TMV itself became a prominent model system for understanding the molecular nature of heredity and the relationship between proteins and nucleic acids ... Notably, some of the main scientists involved in elucidating the double-helical structure of DNA were also studying TMV, which became a tool for cracking the ."

"By 1950 the nature of the virus was no longer a mystery. Viruses were known to be s, genetic units, parasites that depend on their hosts for and . But a funny thing happened on the road to this knowledge. The viruses that most shaped this emerging portrait were not the most dangerous s, but those examples, however innocuous to humans, that made good laboratory subjects. Researchers constructed general knowledge about viruses based on a few that, by reason of historical precedence or biological robustness, were intensively studied as representatives of the rest."

"Like ’’’’, is part of the biologist's . The best-known model systems—standardized organisms such as the and the —are investigated by an entire community of biologists. Model systems become prototypes within which key biological questions are defined and resolved, useful precisely because they have already been so well studied. was a model system in these respects, studied and discussed by a large contingent of s, s, and other agricultural and medical researchers ..."

"s used s to reveal the sequence of chemical reactions in . s followed the assimilation and turnover of key s and tagged molecules such as to track the movement and activity of s. s labeled s with radioisotopes to follow the replication and expression of s. Physicians utilized radioisotopes such as and to diagnose and detect s. Ecologists profited as well, using to trace through the living and nonliving parts of aquatic and terrestrial landscapes, giving concrete meaning to the notion of an ecosystem."

"put to work in , having induced in an inbred mouse strain (Strong A) that was particularly susceptible to the implantation of tumors ... He and K. G. Scott found that these leukemic mice concentrated more radiophosphorus in their s and s than did healthy mice after both groups received tracer doses. ... This finding stoked hopes that radioisotopes would be selectively absorbed and localized in cancer patients, where they could serve to irradiate tumors."

"In Life Atomic, Angela Creager weaves an engaging tale of the history of s. Much of her material came from government documents from the Manhattan Project that were declassified during the . ... Creager introduces the concepts and vocabulary of radioisotopes at a level that any reader can appreciate."

"... one of the virtues of Creager's admirable book is that the attentive, even if scientifically uninformed, reader will learn a great deal, not only about these subjects but more generally about the character of during the last two-thirds of the twentieth-century. By tracking the history of from the applied realm of through its acceptance as —a widely and conventionally accepted laboratory tool—Creager traces more general trends in the development of , genetics, and . ... The power of Creager's method lies in how it underlines the dynamic set of relationships between ideas and experimental practice, between the laboratory and its sources of support."

"The evidence from and fossils indicates that , , and probably the other , are cylinders of slowly building on a sinking or ; has occurred in and younger time, and there were three major periods of emergence during which the coral rocks were weathered subaerially."

"My had developed a craving to have his own land to experiment with a new idea: '. We needed, he said, to find out what the original had been like in our area and what we could do to bring it back. That, and his desire to have a special place to hunt, led to his purchase in the mid-1930s of an abandoned farm along the , in the —"." He specifically chose the Shack land because of its isolation and because this farm was a land of impoverished soil that had become an agricultural failure. In his view this was sick land that needed restoration; it needed to see again the native species that once must have grown here. It was one instance of his larger vision of the countrywide importance of land health and fostering the community of life."

"To better understand how far various grains were transported by wind, she and Allen Solomon (then at the ) set a network of pollen traps near and s in the to match the pollen rain with different . These data were used to develop a pollen-vegetation calibration that still informs studies in the region and beyond."

"When one observes the many and great changes that have occurred in some s since the beginning of the , he is inclined to the belief that a longer period of time was involved than he had been led to believe. is an example where lakes of great depth once existed in a locality that is now a true desert. Segments of giant fans, some faulted, have been built out on the dried-up lake basin. Some large s on the surface are so deeply weathered that a hammer blow will reduce them to . We are rapidly learning that certain are much more rapid than we have been wont to believe. But only recently have s attempted to determine by actual measurement process rates formerly the subject of general reasoning or speculation. Such measurement programs have documented the fact that rates of landscape change are greater than had earlier been suspected."

"Over a period of ten years, simultaneous measurement of storm rainfall and resulting during individual storms were made in small basins in the , California. By simple measurement, without any recording devices, data collected define a relation of basin lag time to drainage area. This lag time, expressed as time between center of mass of rainfall and center of mass of runoff, is a specific measure of some basin characteristics including the effect of . Using lag time relations, synthetic hydrography construction shows the effect of urbanization on peak discharge from a given storm. The method applied to one storm shows that urbanization increased the peak discharge by two fold."

"The excess of over loss to the is a surprisingly small percentage of the average precipitation. The average amount of water that falls as precipitation over the United States annually is 30 es. Of this total, 21 inches are returned to the atmosphere in the form of through the process of evaporation and transpiration from plants. The balance of 9 inches contributes to the maintenance of and the ."

"The fate of rivers would evidently not be disregarded by Leopold’s watchful eye. In the late 1950s, he and W.B. Langbein initiated what came to be called the Vigil Network, consisting of sections in small s where natural changes would be recorded regularly. Some of these have been operating continuously for half a century, and similar schemes are in operation in Israel and Sweden. Just as productive were some of Leopold’s rafting expeditions down rivers for which he needed depth and velocity data. In 1965, he surveyed 450 km of the in this manner (and again many years later with his distinguished collaborator, the physicist, soldier, and desert explorer ). Besides feeding into the morphometric work, these investigations paved the way for a concerted attack on the problems of and , presaged in a joint study of flood control with T. Maddock Jr. in 1954 and developed with T. Dunne in 1978 and D.L. Rosgen in the 1980s."

"Everyone acknowledges that there are crucial tests to be made and information to be found in the com­ing round of experimentation; so that, given only the resources needed to exploit the visible scien­tific opportunities, we surely face very exciting times. Moreover, the proponents acknowledge, even if everything goes as expected, that there will remain much more to be known than can be revealed in the next round of experimentation. In­deed, there are very stirring visions about what may lie out there beyond the immediately foreseeable do­mains of direct, experimental at­tack. The trouble, however, is this: they conceive that these farther reaches may lie forever beyond direct exper­imental investigation and that, for what can be reached, we may alrea­dy have the basic framework in hand."

"Relativistic quantum theory predicts that particles having must come in pairs with opposite charges but identical masses (and identical lifetimes if unstable). One member of the pair is called the particle, the other the antiparticle. Which is called by which name is a matter of history and convenience. It turns out that there are other kinds of "charge" in addition to electric charge; for example, so-called . The necessity of particle-antiparticle paris obtains for charges of any kind. Thus, not only is there an antiproton to the proton, there is an antineutrino to the neutron. The neutron is electrically neutral but it has baryon number charge."

"Isidor Rabi, on a leave from in the early 1960s, came to Princeton as a visitor to its history department. On several occasions during that year, when the elevated conversation in the history department got to be too much for him, he would drop into my office to “talk physics.” We had already by that time developed a sage-rookie relationship. “What are you up to these days?” he would begin. But when I started to tell, he would cut me and all other theorists of my generation short as mere scribblers and launch into tales of the golden days of his generation, when giants trod the earth. So they had, I knew. After all, he got started in physics as quantum mechanics was being born. This put-down was conveyed with great good humor and I was not at all discomfited; indeed I relished the barbs and the tales."

"Enrico Fermi was the great magnet at . His grasp of physics, and both, was awesome. He took his teaching seriously. We’ve all encountered lecturers who cover up trivialities in layers of formalism and obfuscation. Fermi, the other way around, always got to the heart of things even in the most truly complex situations and exposed it with simplicity and clarity. He was almost too lucid. We could follow and marvel at his tricks and shortcuts but we often stumbled when left to our own devices."

"Some of the al-Tusi material is known to have reached Rome in the 15th century... but there is no evidence that Copernicus ever saw it.…I personally believe he could have invented the method independently."

"Ibn al-Shatir’s forgotten model was rediscovered in the late 1950’s by E. S. Kennedy. .. In a preliminary work, the Commentariolus, he [Copernicus] employed an arrangement equivalent to Ibn al-Shatir's. Later, in De revolutionibus, he reverted to the use of eccentric orbits, adopting a model that was the sun-centered equivalent of the one developed at Maragha. Could Copernicus have been influenced by the Maragha astronomers or by Ibn al-Shatir? ...some of the al-Tusi material is known to have reached Rome in the 15th century (many Greek manuscripts were carried west after the fall of Constantinople in 1453), but there is no evidence that Copernicus ever saw It... . I personally believe he could have invented the method independently."

"All the News That's Fit to Print."

"It is hard to think of any group of seven words that have aroused more newspaper controversy."

"For what is more important and can be desired more urgently from the study of classical languages than the comparison of these with our mother tongue in its most ancient, most perfect form?”"

"They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and I still remember the time, when 1 was a student at Leipzig and begun to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers. . . . No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin and Gothic. All hands were against him. (28) Unlike some of his contemporaries, Muller was effusive in his admiration for things Indian (although he never subscribed to an Indian homeland). In his course of lectures "India: What Can It Teach Us?" (1883), he declared that she was "the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow," indeed, "a very paradise on earth," a place where "the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, [and] has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life. [Such lavish praise was far too extreme for those who, as Muller himself noted, would be] "horror struck at the idea that the humanity they meet with [in India] . . . should be able to teach us any lesson."

"Though Bopp, by the end of his life, was an internationally respected and honored scholar, his was not a career without conflict. Reflecting much later on the difficulties his teacher faced, Max Muller recalled the period in the 1820s and 1830s in which scholars and especially classicists would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India.... No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably looked in their Greek Dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents, would never end."

"The environment men create through their wants becomes a mirror that reflects their civilization; more importantly it also constitutes a book in which is written the formula of life that they communicate to others and transmit to succeeding generations. The characteristics of the environment are therefore of importance not only because they affect the comfort and quality of present-day life, but even more because they condition the development of young people and thereby of society."

"Where earlier historians saw cause to decry the market’s rise, and to claim that negative position for American republicans, she heard past voices speak with optimism and courage about the new economic order, which spawned opportunity for some and hardship, even slavery, for others. Although her work illustrates the strength and interrelatedness of democratic and commercial institutions, Joyce never forgets to chronicle the oppression."

"She is so untortured about knowing her loves and likes, so guiltless about her enjoyment of people, books, ideas, films, works of art, theories, and texts as daunting as Kant or Peirce or as esoteric as the philosophy of science. She devours the stuff, hashes it over with you (even if you are clueless), forms a judgment, then perversely alters it to see if the opposite makes more sense or changes her mind just to get your goat."

"True to her egalitarianism, Joyce regards pretension at home and abroad as insufferable. Unfailingly charming to farmer and colleague alike, in her heart she does not suffer fools or knaves gladly. She regularly writes to tyrants, potentates, or politicians telling them of the errors of their ways."

"Vansina had a truly wonderful gift of making all his students feel like they could do anything. He seemed to know everything, literally beyond our collective comprehension, except for one blind spot: our limitations."

"The hunter catches a dreadful prey, the seaman steers his ship into an unspeakable harbor, the plowman sows and reaps a fearful harvest, the investigator finds the criminal and the judge convicts him—they are all the same man—the revealer turns into the thing revealed, the finder into the thing found, the calculator finds he is himself the solution of the equation and the physician discovers that he is the disease. The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his fundamental ignorance—he is not the measure of all things but the thing measured and found wanting."

"You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply. I claim that privilege too. I am not your slave. I serve Apollo. I don't need Creon to speak for me in public. So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption in your life, to the house you live in, those you live with— who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father's curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light! Soon, soon, you'll scream aloud—what haven won't reverberate? What rock of Cithaeron won't scream back in echo? That day you learn the truth about your marriage, the wedding-march that sang you into your halls, the lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor! And a crowd of other horrors you'd never dream will level you with yourself and all your children. There. Now smear us with insults—Creon, myself and every word I've said. No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you."

"When Hector heard that challenge he rejoiced and right in the no man's land along his lines he strode, gripping his spear mid-haft, staving men to a standstill while Agamemnon seated his Argives geared for combat. And Apollo lord of the silver bow and Queen Athena, for all the world like carrion birds, like vultures, slowly settled atop the broad towering oak sacred to Zeus whose battle-shield is thunder, relishing those men."

"Years of drought and famine come and years of flood and famine come, and the climate is not changed with dance, libation or prayer."

"The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language."

"Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words."

"The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence."

"Indian nouns are extremely connotive; that is, the name does more than simply denote the thing to which it belongs; in denoting the object, it also assigns to it some quality or characteristic."

"In Seneca the north is "the sun never goes there," and this sentence may be used as adjective or noun; in such cases noun, adjective, verb, and adverb are found as one vocable or word, and the four parts of speech are undifferentiated."

"In Ute the name for bear is "he seizes," or "the hugger." In this case the verb is used for the noun, and in so doing the Indian names the bear by predicating one of his characteristics. Thus noun and verb are undifferentiated."

"Economy in speech is the force by which its development has been accomplished, and it divides itself properly into economy of utterance and economy of thought. Economy of utterance has had to do with the phonic constitution of words; economy of thought has developed the sentence."

"Scientific education is catholic; it embraces the whole field of human learning. No student can master all knowledge in the short years of his academic life, but a young man of ability and industry may reasonably hope to master the outlines of science, obtain a deep insight into the methods of scientific research, and at the same time secure an initiation into some one of the departments of science, in such a manner that he may fully appreciate the multitude of facts upon which scientific conclusions rest, and be prepared to enter the field of scientific research himself and make additions to the sum of human knowledge."

"Honest investigation is but the application of common sense to the solution of the unknown. Science does not wait on Genius, but is the companion of Industry."

"In the past, history has been devoted chiefly to the exploits of heroes and the story of wars; but history is now being speedily reorganized and rewritten upon a scientific basis, to exhibit the growth of culture in all its grand departments. History itself is now a science, and is no longer an art in which men exploit in rhetorical paragraphs."

"Scientific education is a training in mental integrity. All along the history of culture from savagery to modern civilization men have imagined what ought to be, and then have tried to prove it true. This is the very spirit of metaphysic philosophy. When the imagination is not disciplined by unrelenting facts, it invents falsehood, and, when error has thus been invented, the heavens and the earth are ransacked for its proof."

"In science nothing can be permanently accepted but that which is true, and whatever is accepted as true is challenged again and again. It is an axiom in science that no truth can be so sacred that it may not be questioned. When that which has been accepted as true has the least doubt thrown upon it, scientific men at once re-examine the subject. No opinion is sacred. “It ought to be” is never heard in scientific circles. "It seems to be" and "we think it is" is the modest language of scientific literature."

"The history of the world is replete with illustrations to the effect that the greater the ignorance the greater the abomination of unconforming opinion, and the greater the knowledge the greater the charity for dissenting opinions."

"On my return from the first exploration of the canyons of the Colorado, I found that...a story of disaster had been circulated, with many particulars of hardship and tragedy, so that it was currently believed throughout the United States that all the members of the party were lost save one. A good friend of mine had gathered a great number of obituary notices, and it was interesting and rather flattering to me to discover the high esteem in which I had been held by the people of the United States. In my supposed death I had attained to a glory which I fear my continued life has not fully vindicated."

"The exploration was not made for adventure, but purely for scientific purposes, geographic and geologic, and I had no intention of writing an account of it, but only of recording the scientific results."

"Realizing the difficulty of painting in word colors a land so strange, so wonderful, and so vast in its features, in the weakness of my descriptive powers I have sought refuge in graphic illustration."

"Many years have passed since the exploration, and those who were boys with me in the enterprise are—ah, most of them are dead, and the living are gray with age. Their bronzed, hardy, brave faces come before me as they appeared in the vigor of life; their lithe but powerful forms seem to move around me; and the memory of the men and their heroic deeds, the men and their generous acts, overwhelms me with a joy that seems almost a grief, for it starts a fountain of tears. I was a maimed man; my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men, never forgot it. In every danger my safety was their first care, and in every waking hour some kind service was rendered me, and they transfigured my misfortune into a boon."

"The mountain slopes...are covered with dense forests of pines and firs. The lakes are often fringed with beautiful aspens, and when the autumn winds come their golden leaves are carried over the landscape in clouds of resplendent sheen."

"The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms; rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand. In long, gentle curves the river winds about these rocks."

"On the walls, and back many miles into the country, numbers of monument-shaped buttes are observed. So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon."

"We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly."

"The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse. The Cyclopean forms which result from the sculpture of tempests through ages too long for man to compute, are wrought into endless details, to describe which would be a task equal in magnitude to that of describing the stars of the heavens or the multitudinous beauties of the forest with its traceries of foliage presented by oak and pine and poplar, by beech and linden and hawthorn, by tulip and lily and rose, and by fern and moss and lichen. Besides the elements of form, there are elements of color, for here the colors of the heavens are rivaled by the colors of the rocks. The rainbow is not more replete with hues. But form and color do not exhaust all the divine qualities of the Grand Canyon. It is the land of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling in floods of music when the storm gods play upon the rocks and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the infinite blue of heaven is unveiled. With the melody of the great tide rising and falling, swelling and vanishing forever, other melodies are heard in the gorges of the lateral canyons, while the waters plunge in the rapids among the rocks or leap in great cataracts. Thus the Grand Canyon is a land of song. Mountains of music swell in the rivers, hills of music billow in the creeks, and meadows of music murmur in the rills that ripple over the rocks. Altogether it is a symphony of multitudinous melodies. All this is the music of waters. The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp, upon which the clouds of the heavens play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers.The glories and the beauties of form, color and sound unite in the Grand Canyon—forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain. But more, it is a vast district of country. Were it a valley plain it would make a State. It can be seen only in parts from hour to hour and from day to day and from week to week and from month to month. A year scarcely suffices to see it all. It has infinite variety, and no part is ever duplicated. Its colors, though many and complex, at any instant change with the ascending and declining sun; lights and shadows appear and vanish with the passing clouds, and the changing seasons mark their passage in changing colors. You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained, never again to be equaled on the hither side of Paradise."