Stanford University alumni

"Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be."

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

"Some kinds of government regulation of private consensual homosexual behavior may face substantial constitutional challenge."

"One can conclude that certain essential, or fundamental, rights should exist in any just society. It does not follow that each of those essential rights is one that we as judges can enforce under the written Constitution. The Due Process Clause is not a guarantee of every right that should inhere in an ideal system. Many argue that a just society grants a right to engage in homosexual conduct. If that view is accepted, the Bowers decision in effect says the State of Georgia has the right to make a wrong decision — wrong in the sense that it violates some people's views of rights in a just society. We can extend that slightly to say that Georgia's right to be wrong in matters not specifically controlled by the Constitution is a necessary component of its own political processes. Its citizens have the political liberty to direct the governmental process to make decisions that might be wrong in the ideal sense, subject to correction in the ordinary political process."

"Indeed I do and I admire it. I am a practicing Catholic."

"The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech."

"Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line."

"Why did I resign you ask?"

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State. … people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail…. We conclude the line should be drawn at viability, so that, before that time, the woman has a right to choose to terminate her pregnancy…. there is no line other than viability which is more workable. To be sure, as we have said, there may be some medical developments that affect the precise point of viability, but this is an imprecision within tolerable limits. … A husband has no enforceable right to require a wife to advise him before she exercises her personal choices."

"We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be."

"Even laws enacted for broad and ambitious purposes often can be explained by reference to legitimate public policies which justify the incidental disadvantages they impose on certain persons. Amendment 2, however, in making a general announcement that gays and lesbians shall not have any particular protections from the law, inflicts on them immediate, continuing, and real injuries that outrun and belie any legitimate justifications that may be claimed for it. We conclude that, in addition to the far-reaching deficiencies of Amendment 2 that we have noted, the principles it offends, in another sense, are conventional and venerable; a law must bear a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose, Kadrmas v. Dickinson Public Schools, 487 U. S. 450, 462 (1988), and Amendment 2 does not."

"The primary rationale the State offers for Amendment 2 is respect for other citizens' freedom of association, and in particular the liberties of landlords or employers who have personal or religious objections to homosexuality. Colorado also cites its interest in conserving resources to fight discrimination against other groups. The breadth of the amendment is so far removed from these particular justifications that we find it impossible to credit them. We cannot say that Amendment 2 is directed to any identifiable legitimate purpose or discrete objective. It is a status-based enactment divorced from any factual context from which we could discern a relationship to legitimate state interests; it is a classification of persons undertaken for its own sake, something the Equal Protection Clause does not permit. "[C]lass legislation ... [is] obnoxious to the prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment .... " Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S., at 24. We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause, and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Colorado is affirmed. It is so ordered."

"In the federal confirmation process, a standard question from the judiciary committee is, "Well, if you're confirmed will you legislate?" And, with a look of horror, the nominee says, "Oh, I won't legislate." Well, what about the law of contract and tort; where do they think it came from, the stork?"

"Our system presumes that there are certain principles that are more important than the temper of the times. And you must have a judge who is detached, who is independent, who is fair, who is committed only to those principles, and not public pressures of other sort."

"The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off."

"The Supreme Court of Florida has said that the legislature intended the State's electors to "participat[e] fully in the federal electoral process," as provided in 3 U. S. C. §5. That statute, in turn, requires that any controversy or contest that is designed to lead to a conclusive selection of electors be completed by December 12. That date is upon us, and there is no recount procedure in place under the State Supreme Court's order that comports with minimal constitutional standards. Because it is evident that any recount seeking to meet the December 12 date will be unconstitutional for the reasons we have discussed, we reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida ordering a recount to proceed. Seven Justices of the Court agree that there are constitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court that demand a remedy."

"First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."

"The argument, in essence, is that protected speech may be banned as a means to ban unprotected speech. This analysis turns the First Amendment upside down. The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech. Protected speech does not become unprotected merely because it resembles the latter. The Constitution requires the reverse."

"Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions"

"The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.... Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.... As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."

"Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."

"It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty."

"When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity."

"The Constitution doesn't belong to a bunch of judges and lawyers. It belongs to you."

"I knew Earl Warren very well, on a somewhat professional basis. Professional, as in I was a nine-year-old page boy and he was the Governor. We knew his children and played in the Governor's Mansion and so forth. I have a letter I've given to the Supreme Court Historical Society, in which he wrote and said, "You're going to go very far in government." I'm very proud of the fact that I knew well someone who later became the Chief Justice of the United States."

"[T]his Court now concludes that independent [political] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption."

"Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people. [...] The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it. [...] By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each."

"When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves."

"The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth."

"Only a weak society needs government protection or intervention before it pursues its resolve to preserve the truth. Truth needs neither handcuffs nor a badge for its vindication."

"The essence of democracy is that the right to make law rests in the people and flows to the government, not the other way around. Freedom resides first in the people without need of a grant from government."

"Dignitary wounds cannot always be healed with the stroke of a pen."

"The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed."

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

"The freedom secured by the Constitution consists, in one of its essential dimensions, of the right of the individual not to be injured by the unlawful exercise of governmental power. The mandate for segregated schools, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954); a wrongful invasion of the home, Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505 (1961); or punishing a protester whose views offend others, Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397 (1989); and scores of other examples teach that individual liberty has constitutional protection, and that liberty’s full extent and meaning may remain yet to be discovered and affirmed. Yet freedom does not stop with individual rights. Our constitutional system embraces, too, the right of citizens to debate so they can learn and decide and then, through the political process, act in concert to try to shape the course of their own times and the course of a nation that must strive always to make freedom ever greater and more secure. Here Michigan voters acted in concert and statewide to seek consensus and adopt a policy on a difficult subject against a historical background of race in America that has been a source of tragedy and persisting injustice. That history demands that we continue to learn, to listen, and to remain open to new approaches if we are to aspire always to a constitutional order in which all persons are treated with fairness and equal dignity. Were the Court to rule that the question addressed by Michigan voters is too sensitive or complex to be within the grasp of the electorate; or that the policies at issue remain too delicate to be resolved save by university officials or faculties, acting at some remove from immediate public scrutiny and control; or that these matters are so arcane that the electorate’s power must be limited because the people cannot prudently exercise that power even after a full debate, that holding would be an unprecedented restriction on the exercise of a fundamental right held not just by one person but by all in common. It is the right to speak and debate and learn and then, as a matter of political will, to act through a lawful electoral process."

"The respondents in this case insist that a difficult question of public policy must be taken from the reach of the voters, and thus removed from the realm of public discussion, dialogue, and debate in an election campaign. Quite in addition to the serious First Amendment implications of that position with respect to any particular election, it is inconsistent with the underlying premises of a responsible, functioning democracy. One of those premises is that a democracy has the capacity—and the duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices. That process is impeded, not advanced, by court decrees based on the proposition that the public cannot have the requisite repose to discuss certain issues. It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds. The process of public discourse and political debate should not be foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to use racial division and discord to their own political advantage. An informed public can, and must, rise above this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must, mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people."

"A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more. The Court has sought to protect the right to speak in this spatial context. A basic rule, for example, is that a street or a park is a quintessential forum for the exercise of First Amendment rights. See Ward v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U. S. 781, 796 (1989). Even in the modern era, these places are still essential venues for public gatherings to celebrate some views, to protest others, or simply to learn and inquire."

"Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth. For that reason the laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights. The exercise of their freedom on terms equal to others must be given great weight and respect by the courts. At the same time, the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression. As this Court observed in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. ___ (2015), “[t]he First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 27). Nevertheless, while those religious and philosophical objections are protected, it is a general rule that such objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law. See Newman v. Piggy Park Enterprises, Inc., 390 U. S. 400, 402, n. 5 (1968) (per curiam); see also Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., 515 U. S. 557, 572 (1995) (“Provisions like these are well within the State’s usual power to enact when a legislature has reason to believe that a given group is the target of discrimination, and they do not, as a general matter, violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments”)."

"The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of religion and promises the free exercise of religion. From these safeguards, and from the guarantee of freedom of speech, it follows there is freedom of belief and expression. It is an urgent necessity that officials adhere to these constitutional guarantees and mandates in all their actions, even in the sphere of foreign affairs. An anxious world must know that our Government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward, and lasts."

"In June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court's majority opinion in Lawrence overruled Bowers. Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority, which was long on philosophy and short on precedent. Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence is a result in search of a rationale. He began with "Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places." This statement means absolutely nothing from a constitutional perspective. Every criminal or immoral act can be justified on the grounds of exercising liberty. But Kennedy has a purpose in such an approach. By using the catchall word "liberty" rather than applying the Constitution to the issue, he seeks to expand the plain meaning of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (which prohibits states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law") to grant rights not mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution."

"Kennedy and the majority explicitly overruled Bowers and wrote that Stevens's original reasoning, in dissent, that morality alone is not a legitimate basis to support a law was right. Scalia countered, "This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, [no law against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity] can survive rational-basis review. Kennedy, traveling further and further away from his judicial responsibility to interpret the Constitution, wrote of an "emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection" to sexual decisions and reviewed how sodomy laws had been repealed in most states and even in Europe, where the European Court of Human Rights found sodomy laws invalid under the European Convention on Human Rights. Kennedy concluded with a lecture about liberty: "The petitioners are entitled to respect their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government... The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual." (Emphasis added.)"

"The theory community, myself included - became rather troubled about the particle."

"You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to teach physics at MIT. The physics majors at MIT are there because they want to be there. Their love of physics is infectious...I've likened it to teaching art history in Rome."

"I feel I may be controversial in this, but I think that wisdom doesn't count for a lot in theoretical physics. It’s not like history and literature, where you accumulate a broader and broader world view. It’s not a question of energy; I have plenty of energy. I just wrote—just finished writing this massive book...I think most theoretical physicists do their best work when they're young, because they see problems fresh for the first time."

"Some years later I spoke to a mentally disturbed young man. Very agitatedly, he described to me how alien beings from outer space had invaded the earth. They were formed of mental substance, lived in human minds, and controlled human beings through the creations of science and technology. Eventually this alien being would have an autonomous existence in the form of giant computers and would no longer require humans–and that would mark its triumph and the end of humanity. Soon he was hospitalized because he was unable to shake off this terrible vision."

"I used to climb mountains in snow and ice, hanging onto the sides of great rocks. I was describing one of my adventures to an older friend once, and when I had finished he asked me, "Why do you want to kill yourself?" I protested. I told him that the rewards I wanted were of sight, of pleasure, of the thrill of pitting my body and my skills against nature. My friend replied, "When you are as old as I am you will see that you are trying to kill yourself.""

"I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness."

"Most physicists enjoy the outdoors. They are mushroom gatherers, bird watchers, hikers, amateur mountaineers whose idea of weekend relaxation is to climb a mountain. Several physics summer schools and research centers are located in or near mountainous areas. I have not seen such uniform recreational impulses in other professions, an observation which prompts speculation on the connection between the nature of inquiry in physics and mountain climbing."

"People did not always love the mountains. Just a few hundred years ago the high mountains were regarded as horrible, monstrous places filling people with terror and fear. The inhabitants near them were seen as awful demons, subhumans. But this attitude got transformed into just the opposite, especially by Romantic writers and painters in the nineteenth century. Seen by the Romantics, high mountains became places of impossible beauty, where the quality of light and the expansive solitary grandeur of the high peaks opened the heart of the individual. A man climbing a mountain became the image of self-conscious intelligence pitted against the eternal indifference of the forces of nature. Compared to these forces of nature, we are nothing save for the will that moves our limbs. Only that will is truly our own."

"Mountain climbing is an analogue of the research process in theoretical physics. In working on a problem in physics one is never assured of a solution, because there are many false leads and pitfalls. Likewise in climbing there is no certainty of attaining the summit; the route is often unknown, or sometimes one attains a false summit. But the important point is that if you reach the top, the view is enormous. There is no comparison between what you see from just below the summit and what you can see from the top. Similarly with finally solving an important problem in physics the view you get is enormous."

"Perhaps our thinking exemplifies a selective system. First lots of random scattered ideas compete for survival. Then comes the selection for what works best — one idea dominates, and this is followed by its amplification. Perhaps the moral [...] is that you never learn anything unless you are willing to take a risk and tolerate a little randomness in your life."

"Although the idea that the universe has an order that is governed by natural laws that are not immediately apparent to the senses is very ancient, it is only in the last three hundred years that we have discovered a method for uncovering that hidden order — the scientific-experimental method. So powerful is this method that virtually everything scientists know about the natural world comes from it. What they find is that the architecture of the universe is indeed built according to invisible universal rules, what I call the cosmic code — the building code of the Demiurge. Examples of this universal building code are the quantum and relativity theory, the laws of chemical combination and molecular structure, the rules that govern protein synthesis and how organisms are made, to name but a few. Scientists in discovering this code are deciphering the Demiurge's hidden message, the tricks he used in creating the universe. No human mind could have arranged for any message so flawlessly coherent, so strangely imaginative, and sometimes downright bizarre. It must be the work of an Alien Intelligence!"

"We surely stand at the threshold of a great adventure of the human spirit — a new synthesis of knowledge, a potential integration of art and science, a deeper grasp of human psychology, a deepening of the symbolic representations of our existence and feelings as given in religion and culture, the formation of an international order based on cooperation and nonviolent competition. It seems not too much to hope for these things. The future, as always, belongs to the dreamers."

"אם הייתי פלסטיני בגיל המתאים, הייתי נכנס בשלב מסוים לאחד מארגוני הטרור...פעולות ארגוני הטרור הפלסטיני, הפוגעות בנשים וילדים הן חמורות, נבזיות ושפלות"

"There is another story, that we tried to impose upon him [Arafat] cantons, Bantustans. Total lie. We talked about 80%+ of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip. How can it become non-contiguous? And if you have some reservation against this or that curl of the border, at some corner, come to the table, negotiate it, and demand that this will be removed. I can go with you more and more, and I cannot afford spending more time on it, but basically, all these were stories that were invented in order to explain to his own people, and maybe to try to convince honest people in the free world how come that such an opportunity had been missed. Of course, I had my own demands, to protect Israel, to ensure our security, to make sure that we know where do we head. I said loud and clear: we have to put an end to this asymmetric process where we are supposed to give tangible assets, and the Palestinians have just to give vague promises about the nature of future relationship. I said I'm ready to go very far, but I want to know, now, that there is a partner, which is ready and capable to make tough decisions, and painful decisions. I was a great supporter of the peace of the brave, but never a supporter of peace of ostriches, where you put your head in the sand, let whatever happen, happen, and then wake up and say, OK, that's what happened. We cannot afford this approach. That's the reality."

"[How is it consistent with what you advocated this evening in terms of a vision for peace, that you continued to allow the building of settlements in the West Bank, during your primeministership?] Let me tell you, first of all, during my term as a Prime Minister, we have not built a single new settlement. I ordered the dismantling of many voluntary -- I don't know how to call it -- new settlements that had been set on top of hills in different parts of the West Bank, basically. But, I allowed contracts, contracts that had been signed, legally, in Israel, beforehand. To build new neighborhoods in some big cities in the West Bank, cities with 25,000 or 30,000 people. And very few new homes, in small settlements, where youngsters, who came back from the army service, asked to build their home near the home of their parents. Now, Israel is a law-abiding state, you cannot break contracts, there is Supreme Court. If the government behaves in a way that is not proper, any individual can appeal and change whatever we decide. Realizing that this is a sensitive issue from the Palestinian side, I talked to Arafat, at the beginning of my term as a Prime Minister, and I told him: Mr. Chairman, I know that you are worried about it, it creates some problems, in your own constituency. But let me tell you, we have a great opportunity here to put an end to the whole conflict, in a year and a half. When President Clinton that invested unbelievable amount of energy and political capital in trying to solve it, and he's still in power. Now, I understand your problem with settlement if there is no end, there is no time limit, and you are afraid that maybe the accumulation of new settlements will change the nature of the situation, for the worse, from your position. So I tell you, out of our own considerations, independent of you, we have decided not to set even a single new settlement. We will not allow anyone to establish his own private initiatives on the hills, for our own reasons, not because of you. But at the same time I will respect any contract that has been signed, under law, in Israel. But -- and here is a point -- bearing in mind that we can put an end to the conflict, to reach an agreement within a year and a half, why the hell it will matter? To build a new building in Israel takes more than a year and a half, so you won't see any building that is not already emerging from the ground, having it's roof before we can reach an agreement. Now if such a building happens to be in a settlement that will become, under the agreement, part of the new independent Palestine, why the hell you have to care? Take it, use it, put some refugees in it. And if it will happen to be a part of what will be agreed, as Israel, in a mutual agreement that is signed by you, why the hell do you care, if you agree? I believe that that simple answer would not solve his public -- or internal political -- problems, but it would solve the real issue if the will was there to make peace, and not just to politically maneuver and manipulate."

"["DONALDSON: But on Friday, you were very pessimistic. You said, "No good," when someone asked you how things were going."] No, I'm saying even now, if I have to summarize the situation - in one word it's good, in two words, not good."

"The Left is acting like a young child, saying 'I want peace'... A child says 'I want candy right away,' an adult takes all of the factors into account and understands who he's dealing with."

"Life-sustaining Zionism and the seeds of fascism cannot live together."

"What has happened is a hostile takeover of the Israeli government by dangerous elements. And it's just the beginning."

"This government needs to be brought down before it brings all of us down, there are no serious leaders left in the world who believe the Israeli government."

"His knowledge of war has fed a passion for peace."

"The teacher asked us to write an essay based on an artist's visual version of the cold and other hardships endured by Washington's men at Valley Forge. I dashed off a page or so of commentary, which brought from the teacher public commendation for my historical empathy and perception. This juvenile effort may have influenced my instructor when he gave me a grade on my report card of 100 percent in history. I thought then, and still think, that no pupil is worth 100 percent in history."

"Vietnam is the dead albatross around Johnson's neck that may pull him down."

"The two-thirds rule [of the Senate], which can be changed only by constitutional amendment, will no doubt continue for a long time to come. Like monogamy, it is not completely satisfactory, but, like monogamy, it has won general if somewhat grudging acquiescence."

"Too many so-called historians are really 'hysterians'; their thinking is more visceral than cerebral. When their duties as citizens clash with their responsibilities as scholars, Clio frequently takes a back seat."

"Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos."

"We must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the 'body-and-mind' as a whole to the events of reality."

"Plastic automatism.. ..as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconsciousness. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century greatest formal inventions."

"Great art is never extreme. Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science.. .In this world modern artists form a kind of spiritual underground."

"[modern art is the story of certain peoples'] desire to get rid of what is dead in human experience, to get rid of concepts, whether aesthetic or metaphysical or ethical or social, that, being garbed in the costumes of the past, get in the way of their enjoyment."

"One is to know that art is not national, that to be merely an American or a French artist is to be nothing; to fail to overcome one's initial environment is never to reach the human.. .Thus when we say one of the ideals of modern art has been internationalism, it is.. ..as a natural consequence of dealing with reality on a certain level. [quote in 1946]"

"One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again."

"The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition.. .We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist's task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content."

"The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions,- that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended."

"The activity of the artist makes him less socially conditioned and more humans. It is then that he is disposed to revolution. Society stands against anarchy; the artist stands for the human against society; society therefore threats him As an anarchist. Society's logic is faulty, but its intimation of an enemy is not. Still, the social conflict with society is an incidental obstacle in the artist's path."

"It is Cezanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling.."

"Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world.. .The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life."

"Every intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head."

"Don't underestimate the influence of the Surrealist state of mind on the young American painters [like his artist-friends William Baziotes and w:Roberto Matta in those days."

"..there is a real Dada strain in the minds of the New York School of abstract painters that has emerged in the last decade."

"Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation.. .. [the] excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets.. ..this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place. [Motherwell is quoting here the comments of w:Henri Focillon on Japanese legends of 'accidentalism']"

"[the process of painting..] ..is conceived of as an adventure, without preconceived ideas on the part of persons of intelligence, sensibility, and passion. Fidelity to what occurs between oneself and the canvas, no matter how unexpected, becomes central.. ..the major decisions in the process of painting are on the grounds of truth, not taste..."

"Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic."

"The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear. From their perspective, it is the social world that tends to appear irrational and absurd."

"..no true artist ends with the style that he expected to have when he began,. ..it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one's own style."

"..a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.. [remark in 1951 on the concept of automatism ]."

"It would be very difficult to formulate a position in which there were no external relations. I cannot imagine any structure being defined as though it only has internal meaning."

"..for most painters nowadays [1954] examination is self-examination – this is all that we are accustomed to – while the relation to the audience is a social matter. And it is our pictures, not ourselves, that live the social life and meet the public."

"A modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he paints in relation to none of them, though he longs for the audience of other modern painters."

"Indeed, our society, which has seemed so freedom-giving and passive in its attitudes toward the artist really makes extraordinary demands upon him: on the one side, to be free in some vague spiritual sense, free to act only as an artist, and yet on the other side to be rigorously tested as to whether the freedom he has achieved is great enough to be more solidly dependable than a government's financial structure.. .No wonder that modern painters, in view of these curious relations to society, have taken art matters into their own hands, decides for themselves what art is, what its subjects are to be, and how they are to be treated. Art like love is an active process of growth and development."

"I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting.. .An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies..."

"I think he Pollock responded to rhythm more than anything else in art. Indeed, perhaps it is not to much to assert that his greatest works are marked by the intensity and violence of his rhythm, modified by an incorruptible respect for the work's flat surface, an art masculine and lyrical and, as in a Celtic dance, measured, despite its original primitive impulse. That he also meant to me, his rhythm..."

"I begin [a painting] from an impulse, an intense and irrational desire that takes you over, prompting you to start moving. And from experience, with some knowledge of what moves oneself, I think it's not altogether arbitrary what one begins with.. ..certainly implicit partially is the feeling, not that 'I am going to paint something I know' by 'through the act of painting I'm going to find out exactly how I feel'."

"In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on..."

"Before 1940 there was relatively little abstract art in America. Most of it was relatively geometric versions of Cubism, or of Mondrian and De Stijl, or of Arp reliefs, and the like. So that when our painting [of the artists of the New York School: Abstract Expressionism first appeared, the critics at once realized that to describe it as 'abstract' would be misleading.. .In America, the word (I suppose taken from Germany) for something highly emotional is 'expressionist', and some critic, either in the New Yorker or the New York Times then called it Abstract Expressionism, meaning that this was a very emotional art, but an abstract one."

"Well, Mondrian is absolute, and is pure, and those are real aspirations of our [American Abstract Expressionism art]. When I say 'pure', I don't mean 'clean' . I don't think Mondrian himself did; I knew him when he was here [New York] during the war. He went to an exhibition by the Surrealist, Tanguy, and was asked what he thought, and he said he would like Tanguy's pictures better if they were dirtier, that for him they were to clean... .I think he meant that when they were to 'clean', they were essentially lifeless, statuesque, unrevised. As for me, I must say, Mondrian's painting is intensely rhythmic, warm, passionate - restricted as the means ostensibly seem to me."

"I mean, the official definition of Surrealism is to make a work automatically without a priori aesthetic or moral conditions, which is exactly what we do [artist in New York School / Abstract Expressionism]. At the same time Surrealism was an assault, - with a few exceptions: Giacometti, Arp and Miro - on the 'purity' of painting. I mean mean, on making painting - means themselves speak, without reliance on literature; and that second insistence of Surrealism, Americans really rejected. So that historically.. ..Abstract Expressionism is in part, I think, a fusion of certain Surrealist means, above all plastic 'automatism' with the Cubist's insistence that the picture speaks as a picture in strictly pictorial language."

"And finally after months of really a cold war [between his father and him] he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph.D. so that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then - it was actually the last year - Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he didn't care what the Ph.D. was in, I went on to Harvard."

"When I was young I was more obsessed with the materiality of things.. ..today I am more interested in air and atmosphere. This is why I deliberately treat space ambivalently. For example, an orange painting with white lines might be viewed as an orange wall with white lines, but the orange colour is no less atmospheric for all of that. It abounds white light, and the white line vibrate in a deep space, too, as well as an orange 'wall'."

"I love painting the way one loves the body of a women.. ..if painting must have an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make more rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for which everyone has a need."

"When I first saw the work of Matisse I knew that was for me."

"I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. Ultimate unifications come about through modulations of the surface by innumerable trials and efforts. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view."

"I take an elegy to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for something one cared about. The 'Spanish Elegies' [his most famous series of paintings, related to the Spanish Civil War] are not 'political' but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot. They are as eloquent as I could make them. But the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation."

"Among other ends, modern art is related to the ideal of Internationalism."

"I hung Baziote's [painting] show with him at Peggy's in 1944. After it was up and we had stood in silence looking at it for a while, I noticed he had turned white.. .Suddenly he [Baziotes] looked at me and said: 'You're the one I trust; if you tell me the show is no good, I'll take it right down and cancel it.'.. ..you see, at the opposite side of the coin of the abstract expressionist's ambition and of out not giving a damn, was also not knowing whether our pictures were even pictures, let alone whether they were any good..."

"All my life I've been working on the work - every canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each picture is only an approximation of what you want. That's the beauty of being an artist; you can never make the absolute statement, but the desire to do so as an approximation keeps you going."

"You let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head, and in the brush doing what it's doing, it will stumble on what one couldn't by oneself.. .It's essential to fracture influences in the same way that free association in psychoanalysis helps to fracture one's social self-deceptions."

"We [the American Abstract-expressionist artists of the 1940's] were formed by the Depression [1930's], when the American dream lay in pieces on the floor. The possibility of making money was inconceivable to us. America was innocent in relation to modern art, and no one cared. The reigning painters in America were very parochial in relation to the international tradition.. .What held us together was our ambition to use the standards of international modernism as a gauge, not those of Thomas Hart Benton or Grant Wood or Guy Pene du Bois. We did have a terrible struggle, but not for success. It was to make painting that would stand up under international scrutiny, and all the rest was a byproduct.""

"Compared with Brancusi, Matisse, Miro, I'm a barbarian. If people would understand the barbaric force of my paintings, instead of always pointing out how well I understand Picasso. I'm a Viking who has read French literature."

"Among champions of high culture, he [Motherwell] has kept to a policy of 'no compromise.' Not for him the contaminations of popular culture or the wish to get clear once and for all of criteria first formulated in Europe. In his writing, his teaching and his conversation, he has kept open a direct line to the European past, no matter whether the great spirits under discussion are Velazquez or Piero della Francesca, Mozart or Mallarme, Goya or Baudelaire. And if he seems to see himself not only as the admirer of these people, but also their peer, it is for the work to justify that idea, rather than for the artist to repress it - A Teacher And an Editor."

"The great thing about partisanship is you don't have to spend time understanding the issues to know what side you're on."

"Money talks: financing the periphery buys Berlin a leading role recasting the eurozone governance framework. The recent ‘six pack’ of legislative reforms hints at what’s to come: institutionalized fiscal discipline and an excessive imbalances procedure that protects against future moral hazard. The whole eurozone will tilt toward the German surplus model as we get more fiscal integration and more German leverage."

"In China, the state controls the corporations, whereas in the United States, the corporations control the state."

"The G-Zero isn't aspirational, it's analytic. Unfortunately, it's also where we are."

"Up until now Washington has worried that terrorists will become hackers. Perhaps we all should worry that hackers will become terrorists."

"Authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening their political power."

"It's very clear to me–you do not want corporations captured by states. Equally you do not want states captured by corporations."

"I believe that if you go and ask a chief executive of a Goldman Sachs or a BP, and they answer you honestly...they want monopolies, they want government subsidies, they want preferences – they're not interested in free markets.""

"Everyone's talked about Bank of America and Citigroup and the rest being too big to fail, but no, no, no. The most important point...is that the US must be perceived to be too big to fail."

"It's not a third way between state capitalism and free markets, it is the free market way. Multi-national corporations should be the principal actors, but they should be properly regulated."

"In the last 21 months, if you've learnt anything, it's that the state is back. If the free market fails, it's not because it's been defeated by state capitalism; the only people that can defeat the free market is us, we're the only ones who can destroy it."

"When you're leaving your teenage kids alone, probably a good idea to let them know you're going to be checking in on them occasionally. I suspect Greenspan missed that part."

"State capitalism is about more than emergency government spending, implementation of more intelligent regulation, or a stronger social safety net. It’s about state dominance of economic activity for political gain."

"The great thing about the U.S. economy right now is that we are the smart kids in the stupid-kid class. America has fiscal problems and gridlock issues and polarity and partisanship in Congress -- and yet, compared to Japan and Europe, the U.S. looks great."

"The free market tide has now receded. In its place has come state capitalism, a system in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain."

"New York used to be the financial capital of the world. It's no longer even the financial capital of the U.S. For the moment, Washington is."

"India and China offer intriguing mirror images. Modern India has long been open politically and, until recently, closed economically. Modern China has opened economically, but remains politically closed. The comparison reveals that, while politics and economics can never fully be separated, political openness is a better guarantor of long-term stability than economic openness."

"The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes—unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime’s safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve—however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins."

"An emerging market is a country where politics matters at least as much as economics to the market."

"Political scientists don't work at banks—which is a problem. As political issues become more important for the markets, analysts at banks are asked all sorts of questions they don't have the ability to answer. And if you're getting paid to answer questions—as analysts at banks are—you never want to be in the position of saying you don't know."

"Some men like Jack and some like Jill I'm glad I like them both but still I wonder if this freewheeling Really is an enlightened thing, Or is its greater scope a sign Of deviance from some party line? In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight What is my status: Stray? Or Great?"

"All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hands to left or right, And emptiness above— Know that you aren’t alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all their years."

"Imagining the flower-pot attacked it The kitten flung the violets near and far And yet, who knows? This morning, as I backed it, My car was set upon by a parked car."

"'You too will marry a boy I choose,' said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter. Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking around the great lamp-lit garden of Prem Nivas. The wedding-guests were gathered on the lawn. 'Hmm,' she said. This annoyed her mother further."

"[T]hink of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself."

"Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?"

"What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go."

"In life's brief game to be a winner A man must have...oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love."

"They go to work, attend a meeting, Write an equation, have a beer, Hail colleagues with a cheerful greeting, Are conscientious, sane, sincere, Rational, able, and fastidious. Through hardened casings no invidious Tapeworm of doubt, no guilt, no qualm Pierces to sabotage their calm. When something's technically attractive, You follow the conception through, That's all. What if you leave a slew Of living dead, of radioactive "Collateral damage" in its wake? It's just a job, for heaven's sake."

"Catholic and Episcopalian, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, We are all here; no one is alien Now radiation's common laws Impel us into common cause."

"Workers of Lungless Labs—when dying Will you be proud you were midwife To implements exemplifying Assault against the heart of life? If you had scruples, you betrayed them. What pastoral response acquits Those who made ovens for Auschwitz? You knew their purpose, yet you made them. Indeed, it's said that the banality Of evil is its greatest shock. It jokes, it punches its time clock, Plays with its kids. The triviality Of slaughtering millions can't impinge Upon its peace, or make it cringe."

"Killing is dying. This equation Carries no mystical import. It is the literal truth. Our nation Has long believed war was a sport. Unoccupied, unbombed, undying, While 'over there' the shells were flying, How could we know the Russian dread Of war, the mountains of their dead? We reveled in acceleration At every level of the race; And even now we're face to face With mutual extermination We talk as blithely as before Of 'surgical strikes' and 'limited war.'"

"Ten hostages is terrorism; A million, and it's strategy. To ban books is fanaticism; To threaten in totality All culture and all civilization, All humankind and all creation, This is a task of decorous skill And needs high statesmanship and will."

"How ugly babies are! How heedless Of all else than their bulging selves— Like sumo wrestlers, plush with needless Kneadable flesh-like mutant elves, Plump and vindictively nocturnal, With lungs determined and infernal (A pity that the blubbering blobs Come unequipped with volume knobs)."

"He writes with the omniscience and authority of a large, orderly committee of experts on Indian politics, law, medicine, crowd psychology, urban and rural social customs, dress, cuisine, horticulture, funerary rites, cricket and even the technicalities of shoe manufacture."

"Vikram Seth's book A Suitable Boy (1993) that made history as a publishing phenomenon heralded the change from an economist-poet to a full-time writer, making millions in pounds. The media dwelt on its 700,000 words and 1,349 pages, the longest novel published in England since Richardson's Clarissa (1744-48) and longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-69) — and on Seth's advance of more than 2 million pounds. More relevant are the artistic comparisons made to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Tolstoy and Dickens."

"A Suitable Boy (which burlesques poetic pretensions) reads like the offspring of an unlikely mating of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, with its father's looks and mother's temperament."

"In A Suitable Boy, Seth's traditionalism allows him to rediscover character. Mrs Rupa Mehra becomes too substantial, too vivid a presence to be confined within a novel: she is at once infuriating and endearing, a benevolent Indian version of Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a comparison that Seth is typically careful to suggest by equipping her daughter with a Jane Austen novel to read on a train."

"Like Midnight's Children, however, A Suitable Boy too is steeped in an awareness of and affection for indigenous literary and cultural traditions, most notably Urdu poetry, Hindustani classical music, the performed Ramayana, the Ramlila, Shia marsiyas or lamentations, Tagore's songs ('Rabindra Sangeet'), and, of course, Hindi cinema."

"The diversity and range of Seth's work makes him somewhat of an enigma. However, for a writer who counts such diverse figures as Pushkin, T'ang dynasty Chinese poets, Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Tennyson, novelists like Hardy, Austen, George Eliot, R. K. Narayan, and modern poets like Timothy Steele and Philip Larkin among some of his literary influences, Seth's wide-ranging technique is conceivably not so surprising."

"In portraying a domestic life constrained, disrupted, and transformed by civil violence, Seth draws on the nineteenth-century historical novels of Scott, Alessandro Manzoni, Theodore Fontane, and Leo Tolstoy."

"What can we sell them? Not our soul."

"Good physics can be done if we have a good shop. … Given a good shop and good measurement equipment a sound physicist can do wonderful work."

"One of the most fertile and original men I have ever known. … He was a rare combination, almost unique, of a theoretical physicist and a thoroughly practical engineer."

"But in the 1950s, many universities saw an advantage in building up all of the sciences and engineering with an eye toward obtaining federal grant money. No single institution did this better than Stanford University. And no one person was more attuned to using federal grants to build a university than its dean of engineering and eventual provost, Frederick Terman. Dr. Terman, trained as an electrical engineer, was an aggressive man with insight and boundless energy. When he began as dean, Stanford University was considered a good private regional school. When he retired as provost, it was arguably the best university for research in the nation."

"It is better to have one seven-foot jumper on your team than any number of six-foot jumpers."

"I most enjoy helping to build something up, taking an unformulated enterprise and making it into what it could become."

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

"Things that people learn purely out of curiosity can have a revolutionary effect on human affairs."

"The trouble is that you won't get the scientists to agree on a course of action. It is almost instinctive in science to accept contrary views, because disagreeing gives you guidance to experimental tests of ideas — your own and those offered by others…."

"I changed my name when I was about twelve because I didn't like being called Sue or Susie. I felt I needed a longer name because I was so tall. So what happened? Now everyone calls me Sig or Siggy."

"I had such great teachers in high school who made me feel like I could do anything. Then to go to Yale, where these drama teachers made me feel like shit—if I have any advice for young people, it would be, "Don't listen to teachers who say, 'You're really not good enough.' " Just teach me. Don't tell me if you think I'm good enough or not. I didn't ask you. Teachers who do that should be fired."

"I’d send out an intergalactic invitation to other species. I guarantee they would not be like the aliens in the movies I did. I think if they can get here, they could be charming. Stephen Hawking said aliens would be coming for our resources. Well, I don’t know what planet he’s talking about, we don’t have any resources to give them! We’re plundering our own planet. Unless garbage and plastic is something they need, in which case, we could work out a good deal."

"There`s only so much bad luck that a person can have. For her to continue to wake up and con-front the alien and resolve the situation, then go back to sleep and wake up to yet another situation-to me, it`s a burden on the whole science-fiction premise of the alien."

"I feel very complete about her. I think she`s more vulnerable. I think she is truly alone. It`s very interesting to play a character who is truly alone, especially a woman, because women are always seen in relation to men or to other woman. It was a very-not to put our audience off-but it was a very existential situation in many ways."

"I guess I don`t think of film as an innovative medium. I guess I feel that film kind of caught up to what`s been happening to women for the last 20 years."

"With the `60s and the `70s, television gave people a real appetite for violence and slickness. And, for a long time, there was a reluctance to put women in that world. Now, we`ve sort of forced our way in-and I don`t think we`re going to leave."

"(Ripley is) open, honest and tries to do the right thing. I've always played Ripley as an ordinary person who is in extraordinary circumstances, and doesn't give up. I'm not playing a strong feminist statement; I'm playing this woman who has no one else to rely on."

"It was never important to me to display my sexuality. I didn't feel like I had to prove I was a babe to anyone. So I think maybe I always took parts based on the story and director, and very rarely on what the character was. (The roles) I get offered (are) isolated women. . . . It is easier for them to see me as a woman on my own. I can have a token love story, but in the end I'm gonna be this strong woman. Maybe it's harder for them to see me in a couples situation."

"I would rather have stayed in the theater and done comedy. Comedy in film (was) so narrow for women. I was much happier doing very black comedy onstage, and I could never find anything of that ilk on film. The closest to what I might have accomplished was `Working Girl.'"

"Weaver has been struggling with forms of acceptance all her life. The daughter of British actress Elizabeth Inglis and former NBC president Sylvester (Pat) Weaver (he created both the "Today" and "Tonight" shows), Susan Weaver (she adopted the name Sigourney at age 14, from a character in "The Great Gatsby") was reared a child of privilege on Manhattan's upper East Side. But Weaver never felt entirely comfortable with her upbringing. She decided to do a 180 from her expected role in life: during her stay at Stanford University, where she majored in English, Weaver was part of a theater troupe that protested the Vietnam War. She also took to wearing an elf suit, and lived with her boyfriend in a tree house. "It was very natural," says Weaver. "I had a boyfriend, we both played the flute, we made our own clothes. We certainly didn't attract more attention than anyone else around us.""

"Quickly, in one glance, you begin to understand why, as a tall girl, she was called Amazon by her boarding-school classmates and why, as a beautiful girl, she resented it -- so much so that by her father's account, she went and changed her name from Susan to the more stylish Sigourney, lifting it from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story."

"I prefer not to have any image, or any one image," she says, now curled on a couch in a suite at the hotel and sheathed in black, one shoulder bared. "It's because I come from the theater originally. My dream, when I was a young actor, was to be in a repertory company, where you could play the maid in one piece and then play the leading lady in another, and go from comedy to drama and really hop all over the place. And I actually realized a long time ago that you can't expect anything to happen; you can't expect anyone else to know what you want, where you want to go next. So I guess what I'm always doing is trying to create this mini-rep company in my head."

"People don't remember that Sigourney has been one of the first serious actors able to piece together a career that incorporated every aspect of the movie-making spectrum," Mr. Schamus says. "People thought that Bruce Willis had broken that ground in Pulp Fiction. Excuse me? She's been doing this all her life."

"The 'name' of a resource indicates what we seek, an 'address' indicates where it is, and a 'route' tells us how to get there."

"One of the curious features of modern physics is that in spite of its overwhelming success in explaining a vast range of physical phenomena from quark to quasar, it fails to give us a single metaphor for how the universe really works."

"Although mathematics originates in the human mind, its remarkable effectiveness in explaining the world does not extend to the mind itself. Psychology has proved unusually resistant to the mathematization that works so well in physics."

"One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality."

"Quantum physics emerged from the Stone Age with an embarrassment of riches - three quantum theories, each claiming to explain the world. As it turned out, all three were right."

"Though today's quantum theory shows no sign of weakness, someday it may collapse."

"Physicists, for all their odd notions, are basically a conservative lot."

"Most everywhere, most of the time, the world dwells in an unmeasured state."

"So minuscule is the scale of quantum events compared to the actions of everyday life that it's a wonder humans ever found out about the quantum world at all."

"The pragmatist regards any theory as a mere mathematical machine for generating numbers which he then compares with experiment. A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. The pragmatist refuses on principle to speculate about deep reality, such a concept being meaningless from his point of view. Pragmatism is an intelectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy."

"The quantum world is not made up of objects."

"The quantum world is objective but objectless."

"If a friend in Texas seals a silver coin in one envelope and a gold coin in another and mails the envelopes to Tokyo and London, the instant you open you envelope in Japan you know the contents of my envelope in England. But opening your letter causes no physical change in England (faster-than-light or otherwise) but merely involves a change in your knowledge concerning something happening far away and outside your control."

"Strictly speaking, there are no "measurements" in the world, only correlations."

"Legendary King Midas never knew the feel of silk or a human hand after everything he touched turned to gold. Humans are stuck in a similar Midas-like predicament: we can't directly experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch turns to matter."

"The entire visible universe, what Bishop Berkley called "the mighty frame of the world," rests ultimately on a strange quantum kind of being no more substantial than a promise."

"Physicists cannot explain atoms to their children, not because we are ignorant but because we know too much."

"The gist of Bell's theorem is this: no local model of reality can explain the results of a particular experiment."

"Bell himself managed to devise such a proof which rejects all models of reality possessing the property of "locality". This proof has since become known as Bells theorem. It asserts that no local model of reality can underlie the quantum facts. Bell's theorem says that reality must be non-local."

"Non-local influences do not diminish with distance. They are as potent at a million miles as at a millimeter. Non-local influences act instantaneously. The speed of their transmission is not limited by the velocity of light. A non-local interaction links up one location with another without crossing space, without decay, and without delay. A non-local interaction is, in short, unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate."

"The simplicity of Bell's proof opens it to everyone, not just physicists and mathematicians."

"A universe that displays local phenomena but upon a non-local reality is the only sort of world consistent with known facts and Bell's proof."

"Physicists continue to debate whether Bell's theorem is airtight or not. However, the real question is not whether Bell can prove beyond doubt that reality is non-local, but whether the world is in fact no-local."

"No local reality can explain the type of world we live in."

"An object in OOA represents a single typical but unspecified instance of something in the real world - any airplane, I don't care which one, as long as it is typical. The object-oriented analyst distinguishes this concept from that of a specified instance: Airplane number N2713A, Air Force One, or The Spirit of St. Louis, for example."

"While a small domain (consisting of fifty or fewer objects) can generally be analyzed as a unit, large domains must be partitioned to make the analysis a manageable task. To make such a partitioning, we take advantage of the fact that objects on an information model tend to fall into clusters: groups of objects that are interconnected with one another by many relationships. By contrast, relatively few relationships connect objects in different clusters. When partitioning a domain, we divide the information model so that the clusters remain intact... Each section of the information model then becomes a separate subsystem. Note that when the information model is partitioned into subsystems, each object is assigned to exactly one subsystem."

"The key books about object-oriented graphical modeling languages appeared between 1988 and 1992. Leading figures included Grady Booch [Booch,OOAD]; Peter Coad [Coad, OOA], [Coad, OOD]; Ivar Jacobson (Objectory) [Jacobson, OOSE]; Jim Odell [Odell]; Jim Rumbaugh (OMT) [Rumbaugh, insights], [Rumbaugh, OMT]; Sally Shlaer and Steve Mellor [Shlaer and Mellor, data], [Shlaer and Mellor, states] ; and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (Responsibility Driven Design) [Wirfs-Brock]."

"Corporate governance is concerned with holding the balance between economic and social goals and between individual and communal goals. The governance framework is there to encourage the efficient use of resources and equally to require accountability for the stewardship of those resources. The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society."

"If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago."

"The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry."

"Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions. Then, in the alleged proof, be alert for inexplicit assumptions. Euclid's notorious oversights drove this lesson home."

"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."

"Objections... inspired Kronecker and others to attack Weierstrass' "sequential" definition of irrationals. Nevertheless, right or wrong, Weierstrass and his school made the theory work. The most useful results they obtained have not yet been questioned, at least on the ground of their great utility in mathematical analysis and its implications, by any competent judge in his right mind. This does not mean that objections cannot be well taken: it merely calls attention to the fact that in mathematics, as in everything else, this earth is not yet to be confused with the Kingdom of Heaven, that perfection is a chimaera, and that, in the words of Crelle, we can only hope for closer and closer approximations to mathematical truth — whatever that may be, if anything — precisely as in the Weierstrassian theory of convergent sequences of rationals defining irrationals."

"The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so also can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular."

"Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about."

"The so-called obvious was repeatedly scrutinized from every angle and was frequently found to be not obvious but false. "Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics."

"Fashion as king is sometimes a very stupid ruler. As was observed a little way back, the kernel of Plücker's theory of geometric dimensionality is that the dimensionality of a given space is not an absolute constant, but depends upon the elements, accepted as irreducible, in terms of which the space is described."

"Some of his deepest discoveries were reasoned out verbally with very few if any symbols, and those for the most part mere abbreviations of words. Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust on him should try to get on without it for a week."

"Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos."

"Some, of my unmathematical friends have incautiously urged me to include a note about the origin of modern calculating machines. This is the proper place to do so, as the Queen of queens has enslaved a few of these infernal things to do some of her more repulsive drudgery. What I shall say about these marvelous aids to the feeble human intelligence will be little indeed, for two reasons: I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly."

"Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth; some of its rivals do. That science is in some respects inhuman may be the secret of its success in alleviating human misery and mitigating human stupidity."

"Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics."

"[[History of logarithms|[L]ogarithms]] are one of the most disorderly battlegrounds in mathematical history. ... Disputes like this and the other over the calculus have made more than one man of science envy his successors of ten thousand years hence, to whom Newton and Leibniz, Napier and Bürgi, and scores of lesser contestants for individual fame will be semimythical figures as indistinct as Pythagoras."

"The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future; and should analysis ever appear to be without or blemish, its perfection might only be that of death."

"He was admired for his science fiction and his Men of Mathematics. I was shocked when, just a few years later, Walter Pitts told me the latter was nothing but a string of Hollywood scenarios; my own subsequent study of the sources has shown me that Pitts was right, and I now find the contents of that still popular book to be little more than rehashes enlivened by nasty gossip and banal or indecent fancy."

"By the time I was a student in high school I was reading the classic Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell and I remember succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime."

"I swear to abide by the constitution and laws of the Belgian people, to maintain national independence and the integrity of the land."

"I begin my reign with the desire to put myself at the service of all Belgians. I will work for it in perfect agreement with the government and in accordance with the constitution."

"The wealth of our country and our institutional system lies particularly in the fact that our diversity is strength. Whenever we find a balance between unity and diversity, the strength of Belgium is precisely to give meaning to our diversity."

"Princess Marie-Esméralda of Belgium: I am accused of attacking my family and especially the person of the king. That was clearly never my intention, I know how complex and delicate the situation in Belgium is. I know that the king cannot act politically without the permission of the government. I also know how passionate my cousin is about history, but also sensitive to the aspirations and feelings of his fellow citizens. We live in a crucial moment. The opportunity for inter-community dialogue must be seized."

"Laurette Onkelinx: Why did the king have to receive the Vlaams Belang? This is a racist and violent party and I think that the message given by the king is damaging."

"Tom Van Grieken: It is completely normal to invite a party that has won the elections. I was pleased with the invitation … I am not going to say it is unnatural. This is natural. What happened over the past 40 years was not democratic."

"Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe."

"Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development"

"I’ve always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It’s amazing that such rules exist. It’s even more amazing that we can find them."

"Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change."

"A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales."

"The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science."

"The good news is cities are extraordinarily resilient. The bad news is that they are also very hard to change."

"You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient."

"Cities are the crucible of civilization."

"It’s hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company."

"Every fundamental law has exceptions. But you still need the law or else all you have is observations that don’t make sense. And that’s not science. That’s just taking notes."

"Economics hasn't had an Einstein because it hasn't had a Galileo yet."

"I’m not going to tell you that isn’t in a gang, because I can’t say unequivocally that he isn’t. I can’t tell you whether his friends have done the things police have accused them of doing, because I wasn’t there. I can’t tell you what DeSean does with his time, because we play football on opposite ends of the country. I can only tell you that I believe him to be a good person, and if you think, say or write otherwise without knowing the man, you’re in the wrong. And if it’s true the Eagles terminated his contract in part because they grew afraid of his alleged “gang ties,” then they did something worse."

"I look at those words—gang ties—and I think about all the players I’ve met in the NFL and all of us who come from inner-city neighborhoods like mine in Los Angeles, and I wonder how many of us could honestly say we’re not friends with guys doing the wrong things. I can’t."

"I grew up in Watts, and I played baseball with DeSean in elementary school on a team coached by his father near Inglewood. His father, Bill, picked me up from elementary school 30 minutes away from his home for practice and games because my parents both worked and didn’t finish until later, and I wanted to play baseball with some childhood friends. Bill was a great coach, and a great man. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2009, the summer after his son's rookie season. DeSean and I didn’t hang out then like we did as kids. Those men with DeSean in the social pictures and the police reports weren’t his closest friends in childhood, but when his father died and few people were there for him, they were there. When a tragic event like that happens, the people who are around are the people who are around, and they were there for him."

"Was DeSean supposed to then say, “Thanks guys, but now that I’m a millionaire, please leave me alone”? Even i he wanted to, he wouldn’t have. In desperate times for people who come from desperate communities, your friends become your family. I wouldn’t expect DeSean to “distance himself” from anybody, as so many people suggest pro athletes ought to do despite having no understanding of what that means. Going to college and playing in the NFL creates a natural distance, but we can’t push people away just because they’re not as successful as us. I can’t change who I grew up with, but what I can do is try to educate them on the right way of doing things, help them when they need it, and try to keep them out of trouble."

"There is, of course, a tipping point. There have been times when I realized that someone can’t be helped, because they continue doing the wrong things. Typically, the only time I cut someone off is when they’re in jail, because I can’t help them there."

"And if they’re accused of a crime, as DeSean’s friends have been, should that reflect poorly on me? Consider that for every several guys I try to help who end up dead or in jail, there’s another person I was able to rescue from a similar end. Should I give up on everybody out of fear of being dirtied by the media? Sorry, but I was born in this dirt. NFL teams understand that. The Seattle Seahawks get it. The Philadelphia Eagles apparently do not."

"No one should be judged by the actions of others!"

"This offseason they re-signed a player who was caught on video screaming, “I will fight every n----- here.” He was representing the Philadelphia Eagles when he said it, because, of course, everything we do is reflective of the organization. But what did they do to , who, if he’s not a racist, at least has “ties” to racist activity? They fined him and sent him to counseling. No suspension necessary for Cooper and no punishment from the NFL, despite its new interest in policing our use of the N-word on the field. Riley instead got a few days off from training camp and a nice contract in the offseason, too. Commit certain crimes in this league and be a certain color, and you get help, not scorn. Look at the way many in the media wrote about after his DUI arrest. Nobody suggested the Colts owner had “ties” to drug trafficking, even though he was caught driving with controlled substances (prescription pills) and $29,000 in cash to do who-knows-what with. Instead, poor millionaire Mr. Irsay needs help, some wrote."

"But DeSean Jackson is the menace, right? He’s just as bad as those guys he parties with because he threw up a Crip sign in a picture and he owns a gangsta rap record label. If only all record label owners were held to this standard, somebody might realize that Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg weren’t the bosses behind NWA. Jim Irsay lookalikes in suits were."

"But go ahead and judge DeSean for the company he keeps. While you’re at it, judge me, too, because I still live in Los Angeles, and my family does, too. We didn’t run from where we grew up. We aren’t afraid to be associated with the people who came up with us. We brought some of our money back and started charities and tried to help out a few guys who were with us when we were nobodies. I won’t apologize for that, and I suspect neither will DeSean when he’s back on the field doing what he’s always done: grinding through adversity."

"I wasn’t really shocked or anything. Because of what I saw after the incident after the NFC championship game. You’ve got a lot of racial backlash, and a lot of racist comments that were uncalled for – I can never see a time where racism is called for. So it didn’t shock me as much as it would have had I not experienced that personally, had I not seen those things. Because it showed me that America still had some progress to make. On equality, and understanding that it doesn’t matter what color you are, you treat people as people. And whether a good person or a bad person, you don’t judge them off the color of their skin. You can know a person is a good person or a bad person by who they are, not by what they look like. In that situation, it just seems like a lot of people gave him a lot of flack, well deserved, but you know – I feel like a lot more people were surprised then they should have been."

"People want to it to be done, they want that uncomfortable truth to be over with, they want the racism to be done, they want to believe everything is great and hunky-dory. And it’s not. There’s a lot of racism still alive and still active. And it just forced America to rethink it once again. And to really, really understand that racism isn’t gone. We have to actively push it out. And snuff it out."

"I’ve seen him play. I think he’s a great player. And he did a great job in college. You know, it can translate very well into the NFL and you can have the next Brett Favre, the next great quarterback. Or it cannot transfer well. You never know until they put pads on, and step onto an NFL field. We’ve seen a lot of average college players turn into great NFL players. We’ve seen great college players turn into great NFL players. We’ve seen great college players turn into terrible NFL players. So you really never can guess how the game’s going to translate until he goes out there and puts it on tape. [...] I’m one of the guys that believes you’re gonna be who you will yourself to be. So if he believes he’s going to be a great quarterback, and he puts in the work, who’s to stop him? I mean, they say his size. But I’ve sat here and watched win a Super Bowl."

"I think even if they were paid an hourly wage, it’d be quite an improvement from what they get. And you know, I understand the arguments about they’re getting their education paid for, they’re this that and the other, but there are people on academic scholarships that don’t have to deal with any extra rigors. They get their education paid for. And they don’t have to deal with eight hours a day of football, and you know, if you mess up your knee you’ve got to deal with two hours of rehab everyday. So that’s 10 hours of your day gone, and there’s only 24 in a day. So, if they just gave him an hourly wage, even if they gave him 10 bucks, 12 bucks an hour, that’d be a vast improvement over what they got now."

"I was in awe. It was hilarious after I got past the shock. But it was an incredibly surreal experience for me, to get shouted-out by the president."

"You have to temper your emotions and try to stay stable. And also try top stay on your routine. [...] It showed me how fleeting opinions are. And how opinions and people’s choices and I guess criticisms are rarely based in fact. A lot of times they are knee-jerk reactions, a lot of times they’re based off of media perception, you know, what they can see on the surface. Surface perception. And that a lot of people don’t take time to delve deep into things before they make an opinion, or make a criticism or make a remark. And that’s OK. That’s the society we live in, it is what it is, you have to accept it."

"A lot of people had sent to me over the weekend, but I thought this would be the best place to address it. There were some points in that article, or in that post, that were relevant and I could agree with. But there were also some obviously ignorant points in there. I don't think any time's a time to call out for an all-out war against police or any race of people. I thought that was an ignorant statement. But as a black man, I do understand that black lives matter. You know, I stand for that, I believe in that wholeheartedly."

"I also think that there's a way to go about things, and there's a way to do things. And I think the issue at hand needs to be addressed internally, and before we move on, because from personal experience, you know, you are living in the hood, living in the inner city, you deal with things, you deal with people dying."

"Dealt with a best friend getting killed. It was [by] two 35-year-old black men. Wasn't no police officer involved, wasn't anybody else involved, and I didn't hear anybody shouting "black lives matter" then."

"And I think that's the point we need to get to is that we need to deal with our own internal issues before we move forward and start pointing fingers and start attacking other people. We need to solidify ourselves as people and deal with our issues, because I think as long as we have black-on-black crime and, you know, one black man killing another. If black lives matter, then it should matter all the time. You should never let somebody get killed. That's somebody's son, That's somebody's brother; that's somebody's friend. So you should always keep that in mind."

"There's a lot of dealings with police officers right now. I don’t think all cops are bad. You know, I think there’s some great cops out there, who do everything in their power to uphold the badge and uphold the honor and protect the people in society. But there are bad cops, and I think that also needs to be addressed. I think the police officers we have right now, you know, some of it is being brought to light, because of video cameras, everybody has a camera phone. But these are things a lot of us have dealt with our whole lives. And I think right now is a perfect time to deal with it. The climate we're in, everybody's being more accepting, you know, so I think the ignorance should stop. I think people realize that, at the end of the day, we're all human beings. So, you know, before we're black, white, Asian, Polynesian, Latino. We're humans. So, it's up to us to stop it."

"I did not believe this when I heard about it. I watched your videos. I started a life in the ghetto... I banged like a fool 'till I woke up. I was not suppressed by any man or woman, white or black. I worked myself up from Compton High School to a scholarship at Stanford University and I did it myself. I take pride in what I have accomplished both as a black man, and an athlete. I could have stayed in L.A. and banged and used drugs and thought that it was all the white man's fault. But that would be a lie. We are who we want to be; that is what is great about America. We are all born with the same chances in life.. White or black, you choose to be a woman-abusing racist loudmouth. I would love to debate you on national T.V. And if you condone senseless black shootings of whites and police officers, you better make that a debate on Springer, so I can bitch-slap your ignorant ass!"

"You are what is keeping and making the black race look bad. Wake up fool. Do not glorify this half a man, he has worked for nothing. He chose to keep himself where he is, not the white people. It is time to take responsibility for your own actions, and not act like a stinking fool. Kids and young black men and women look at this site, and believe that they are abused. That is a bold-faced lie. It is out of the mouths of cheap thugs like you that are hurting our young and taking away the chances they have to make themselves a productive part of society. Brothers and sisters, the only slavery in America now is the one you put yourself into. Rise up like Doctor King as taught us, and be a real human being. We are all in this together, white and black. Peace to all, and I hope this stupid fake hate stops real soon. We are all brothers and sisters. Do not be fooled by the tyranny of evil men like this. Lift yourself up, educate yourselves, and work hard for a good life. No one owes you anything. Stand proud as a person of color, and do something meaningful with your life. I did and I am the best at what I do! Peace out, R. Sherman."

"Richard Sherman helped stop my team from going to the playoffs a few years ago. An offense which I vowed to never forgive. But after this, not only will I forgive, I might have to order a jersey."

"Although quantum theory involves the use of nonlocal states, such as wave packets and entangled states, there is nothing in the theory, or in the real world so far as it is accurately described by quantum theory, that corresponds to the sorts of instantaneous nonlocal influences which have often been thought to arise in the situation envisaged in the EPR paradox, or implied by the fact that quantum theory violates Bell inequalities."

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

"The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change. ... A proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time."

"When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines."

"Average Americans have little or no influence over the making of U.S. government policy. ... Wealthy Americans wield a lot of influence. By investing money in politics, they can turn economic power into political power."

"Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey."

"Having Colbert suggest that I was a fiction was pretty much one of the highlights of my writing career."

"As a kid, I was unquestionably a nerd, but it wasn't really a culture you could opt into or out of. It was just sort of something you were or were not. As far as today, I'm certainly friendly to that world, with my affinities, but I would probably get kicked out of the national convention for being a bit of a poser. I'm not as well-versed in many of the worlds that I'd need to be a bona fide card-carrying geek these days."

"Every piece of data suggests that workplaces are in dire shape and there is low levels of trust in leaders. For instance, data on employee engagement from Gallup show that worldwide only about 13% of employees report being engaged with their work, and in the U.S., the number is barely higher at 20%. Job satisfaction has declined almost linearly since 1987 to the present. The Edelman Trust index indicates that the public at large has low trust in leaders, while other surveys show that employees do not expect their own leaders to make ethical decisions or to consistently tell them the truth about difficult situations."

"The theme of this book, and the underlying premise of the external perspective on organizations, is that organizational activities and outcomes are accounted for by the context in which the organization is embedded."

"The criticality of a resource can be measured as the ability of an organization to function in the absence of the resource or in the absence of the market for the output."

"The domain of organization theory is coming to resemble more of a weed patch than a well-tended garden. Theories of the middle range (Merton, 1968; Pinder and Moore, 1979) proliferate, along with measures, terms, concepts, and research paradigms. It is often difficult to discern in what direction knowledge of organizations is progressing — or if, it is progressing at all. Researchers, students of organization theory, and those who look to such theory for some guidance about issues of management and administration confront an almost bewildering array of variables, perspectives, and inferred prescriptions."

"The neglect of context, it is argued, leads to the development of theories that do not have the potential of understanding development and change over time or for understanding the subtle nuances of interaction that are critical in apprehending what is really occurring."

"According to the resource dependence perspective, firms do not merely respond to external constraint and control through compliance to environmental demands. Rather, a variety of strategies may be undertaken to somehow alter the situation confronting the organization to make compliance less necessary."

"The theories in this chapter, focusing on the individual level of analysis, differ somewhat from those in the next chapter, in which a more organizational level of analysis is employed. Although all of the theories are essentially cognitive and social definitionist in nature, particularly as developed in the general sociological literature, there are at least two important subgroups within the social constructionist perspective."

"In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy..."

"BEHAVIORAL THEORIES OF THE FIRM: A turn from structure to internal processes was the theme of authors such as Richard Cyert and James March, Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn, and Karl Weick... All but one... was a psychologist by education, so it should not be surprising that their view of organization theory emphasizes internal processes and resembles the micro approach of organizational behavior. Another group of theorists, all but one educated as a sociologist, viewed organizations as a product of macro environmental forces. These behavioralists were Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik, Michael Hannan and John Freeman, and John Meyer and Richard Scott. Pfeffer (the only non-sociologist) and Salancik presented a resource-dependent theory that postulates that organizations require support from their external environment and can only survive to the extent that this support is forthcoming. Managers form coalitions to gather support in an open system of external relationships in which there are constraints that create either a munificent or scarce resource situation."

"Before condemning violence (physical force) as a means of social control, note that its threatened or actual use is widely practiced and respected—at least when applied successfully on a national scale. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and was honored by the Romans; had he simply roughed up the local residents, he would have been damned as a gangster. Alexander the Great, who conquered the Near East, was not regarded by the Greeks as a ruffian, nor was Charlemagne after he conquered Europe. Europeans acquired and divided—and redivided—America by force. Lenin is not regarded in Russia as a subversive. Nor is Spain’s Franco, Cuba’s Castro, Nigeria’s Gowon, Uganda’s Amin, China’s Mao, our George Washington."

"It is a general prevalence of double coincidence of information rather than wants by both parties that would avoid the use of money."

"Where foresight is uncertain, “profit maximization” is meaningless as a guide to specifiable action."

"The greater the uncertainties of the world, the greater is the possibility that profits would go to venturesome and lucky rather than to logical, careful, fact-gathering individuals."

"Neither perfect knowledge of the past nor complete awareness of the current state of the arts gives sufficient foresight to indicate profitable action. Even for this more restricted objective, the pervasive effects of uncertainty prevent the ascertainment of actions which are supposed to be optimal in achieving profits. Now the consequence of this is that modes of behavior replace optimum equilibrium conditions as guiding rules of action. Therefore, in the following sections two forms of conscious adaptive behavior are emphasized."

"Like the biologist, the economist predicts the effects of environmental changes on the surviving class of living organisms; the economist need not assume that each participant is aware of, or acts according to, his cost and demand situation."

"The mark of a capitalistic society is that resources are owned and allocated by such nongovernmental organizations as firms, households, and markets. Resource owners increase productivity through cooperative specialization and this leads to the demand for economic organizations which facilitate cooperation. When a lumber mill employs a cabinetmaker, cooperation between specialists is achieved within a firm, and when a cabinetmaker purchases wood from a lumberman, the cooperation takes place across markets (or between firms). Two important problems face a theory of economic organization—to explain the conditions that determine whether the gains from specialization and cooperative production can better be obtained within an organization like the firm, or across markets, and to explain the structure of the organization."

"The rights of individuals to the use of resources (i.e., property rights) in any society are to be construed as supported by the force of etiquette, social custom, ostracism, and formal legally enacted laws supported by the states' power of violence of punishment. Many of the constraints on the use of what we call private property involve the force of etiquette and social ostracism. The level of noise, the kind of clothes we wear, our intrusion on other people's privacy are restricted not merely by laws backed by police force, but by social acceptance, reciprocity, and voluntary social ostracism for violators of accepted codes of conduct."

"By this I refer to the fact that at the same time several people may each possess some portion of the rights to use the land. A may possess the right to grow wheat on it. B may possess the right to walk across it. C may possess the right to dump ashes and smoke on it. D may possess the right to fly an airplane over it. E may have the right to subject it to vibrations consequent to the use of some neighboring equipment. And each of these rights may be transferable. In sum, private property rights to various partitioned uses of land are "owned" by different persons."

"Alchian: Two things you [Hayek] wrote that had a personal influence on me, after your Prices and Production, were 'Individualism and Economic Order' [sic — Alchian certainly has in mind Hayek's 'Economics and Knowledge'] and 'The Use of Knowledge in Society.' These I would regard as your two best articles, best in terms of their influence on me. Hayek: 'Economics and Knowledge' — the '37 one — which is reprinted in the volume, is the one which marks the new look at things in my way. Alchian: It was new to you, too, then? Was it a change in your own thinking? Hayek: Yes, it was really the beginning of my looking at things in a new light. … I was aware that I was putting down things which were fairly well known in a new form, and perhaps it was the most exciting moment in my career when I saw it [i.e. 'Economics and Knowledge'] in print. Alchian: Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that, because I had that copy typed up to mimeograph for my students in the first course I gave here [i.e. UCLA]. And Allan Wallace … came through town one day, and I said, 'Allan, I've got a great article!" He looked at it, started to laugh, and said, "I've seen it too; it's just phenomenal!' I'm just delighted to hear you say that it was exciting, because it was to me, too … that was a very influential article, I must say."

"Alchian: Perhaps it might have been more appropriate for the Nobel Prize to have gone to you and Hicks together, and [Kenneth] Arrow and [[Gunnar Myrdal|[Gunnar] Myrdal]] together. Hayek: Oh, surely. [laughter]"

"I was a colleague of Armen's, at the Rand Corporation "think tank," during the 1950s, and hold no economist in higher regard. When I sat down at my keyboard just now it was to find out what happened to Armen's works. One Google response was someone saying that Armen should get a Nobel Prize. I concur. My own Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 1990 along with the prize for Wm. Sharpe. I see in Wikipedia that Armen "influenced" Bill, and that Armen is still alive and is 96 years old."

"I personally believe that economics is fun and valuable. People who say they found it a nightmare in college just didn't have a good teacher-professor. I became a good teacher-professor as a result of tenacious mentors during my graduate study at UCLA. Professor Armen Alchian, a very distinguished economist, used to give me a hard time in class. But one day, we were having a friendly chat during our department's weekly faculty/graduate student coffee hour, and he said, "Williams, the true test of whether someone understands his subject is whether he can explain it to someone who doesn't know a darn thing about it." That's a challenge I love: making economics fun and understandable."

"Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned missions as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists."

"In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today, we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity."

"In the first place I have an enormous regard for common sense. Any time we discover some great thing and it contradicts common sense, we better go back to the laboratory and check it."

"The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys?"

"The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially."

"Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were."

"Because that's how it feels when you're depressed."

"Apathetic Annie was complacent and serene Though suffering from , and But Annie did not really care Though life was nearly gone For Annie had a tumor of the ."

"[Harlow] kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."

"Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance: that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties."

"(W)hereas Milgram’s findings need constant reiteration in every generation, Harlow’s research no longer surprises us. One might say that its very success has made teaching it unnecessary: No one would argue against Harlow’s findings, as many students always want to do with Milgram’s."

"We were shooting a Ku Klux Klan parade led by Bill [William Shatner], and he went through the black part of town in a parade of cars carrying crosses with the hoods, and then they burned the flaming cross. We shot late at night; I said, "Cut, print!" and everybody went, "Yeah, we're out of here!" Guys raced to their cars, the grips threw the last couple of things in the trucks and we just drove straight north."

"I come across as a very straightforward guy and that tends to surprise people [...] Clearly my subconscious mind must be some kind of boiling inferno."

"[Asked why he never made a film like the art house titles his company distributed: I]t's an economic situation. All of those films were made in Europe with government subsidies. Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut did not have the necessity of having to earn their money back and so they were free to do what they liked. In the US it's different. It's a money-making industry, so that's what you have to do"

"I don't know if I would say I'm an artist. [...] I would say that I'm a craftsman. I attempt to ply my trade in the best possible way. If occasionally something transcends the craft, then that's wonderful. [...] It doesn't happen very often."

"My father was an engineer and I intended to follow in his footsteps, but movies became my real passion. Careful planning is important in engineering, so I used that experience to focus on film preproduction. With the low budgets I had, I couldn't afford to have the cast and crew waiting around for days on a 10-day picture while I figured out how and what to shoot."

"It's not so much watching them but understanding how they were made – the preparation and willingness to deviate when necessary especially if you're on a low budget, I also took every film I made seriously and did my best on every one."

"What patients seek is not scientific knowledge doctors hide, but existential authenticity each must find on her own. Getting too deep into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability. I remember the moment when my overwhelming uneasiness yielded. Seven words from Samuel Beckett, a writer I’ve not even read that well, learned long ago as an undergraduate, began to repeat in my head, and the seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” I took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” And then, at some point, I was through. I am now almost exactly eight months from my . My strength has recovered substantially. In treatment, the cancer is retreating. I have gradually returned to work. I’m knocking the dust off scientific manuscripts. I’m writing more, seeing more, feeling more. Every morning at 5:30, as the alarm clock goes off, and my dead body awakes, my wife asleep next to me, I think again to myself: “I can’t go on.” And a minute later, I am in my , heading to the operating room, alive: “I’ll go on.”"

"Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed."

"I sat down by the computer to enter orders as the nurses cleaned and the s began to wake the patient. I had always jokingly threatened that when I was in charge, instead of the high-energy everyone liked to play in the , we’d listen exclusively to . I put “” on the radio, and the soft, sonorous sounds of a saxophone filled the room. I left the O.R. shortly after, then gathered my things, which had accumulated over seven years of work—extra sets of clothes for the nights you don’t leave, toothbrushes, bars of soap, phone chargers, snacks, my skull model and collection of neurosurgery books, and so on. On second thought, I left my books behind. They’d be of more use here."

"I think often, especially with immigrant narratives, or narratives from marginalized communities, there is room for only one narrative or that there’s only stereotypes or statistics. A River of Stars does kind of show that we do have different histories, dreams, flaws, and ambitions, and I hope people are able to really see the fullness of the humanity of each character, whether they’re major or minor."

"I think the American dream is still what gets us out of bed every day, that life can be better…"

"Characters, even though they’re minor, shouldn’t be a device. No person should be a device to move the plot along. That’s when you run into problems with stereotypes. I strive, in my journalism and my fiction, to make characters as complex and complicated as they are in real life…"

"Fiction fosters empathy among readers by putting them in a position to consider deeply someone’s history, hopes, and ambitions…"

"Every day there are new estimates coming out for the incubation period (of COVID-19)."

"I'd say that getting started on research early as an undergraduate makes a big difference. If, like me, you don't come from a family background in this area, there are so many exciting things to work on that I knew little about. Undergraduate research upended my preconceived notions of what work in space research is like. I had no idea about what jobs even existed. Working in industry can also be a tremendously valuable experience. Systems engineering work provides a great overview of how spacecraft are built and operated, and seeing the teamwork and cameraderie is inspiring. Teamwork is essential to making missions work; it's like being part of a band or a sports team in that regard. A successful space mission represents hundreds or even thousands of people working together for a common goal, so building teamwork skills is a good idea."

"My family was always interested in nature, and that made me curious about it too – we liked to learn about birds and plants and rocks together. It was really fun! In every bird, plant, or rock, there’s a great story waiting to be learned – it’s like watching a really interesting movie or reading a great book. Now, as a professional scientist, it’s my job to learn things about nature. Every day is different from the next, and there’s always something wonderful to learn about the universe and the world around us."

"I had not realized myself that it’s actually gotten worse. The Chinese treatment of the United States has gotten more unfair, if I can put it that way, than was the case three years ago when I wrote my book trying to sound the alarm."

"Until the Chinese are more cooperative with us in specific areas, maybe we’ve made a mistake in growing China into a great power when its hostility towards us is higher than we realized."

"“When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky.”"

"I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away."

"As for the coldness, I have never seen it like this. I mean, coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from."

"“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.”"

"“There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.”"

"“Further and further we go, and the sun keeps ironing us and ironing us and ironing us.”"

"“Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot’s hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say.”"

"“...and the women spread their ntsaroz and sit on one side, the men on the other, like they are two different rivers that are not supposed to meet.”"

"“Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what."

"“If Messenger would be to open his mouth right now, his voice would be a terrible wound.”"

"“We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.”"

"“I think the reason they are my relatives now is they are from my country too - it's like the country has become a real family since we are in America, which is not our country.”"

"“I used to be very afraid of graveyards and death and such things, but not anymore. There is just no sense of being afraid when you live so near the graves; it would be like the tongue fearing the teeth.”"

"NoViolet Bulawayo has created a world that lives and breathes – and fights, kicks, screams, and scratches, too. She has clothed it in words and given it a voice at once dissonant and melodic, utterly distinct.""

"Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same."

"Even laws enacted for broad and ambitious purposes often can be explained by reference to legitimate public policies which justify the incidental disadvantages they impose on certain persons. Amendment 2, however, in making a general announcement that gays and lesbians shall not have any particular protections from the law, inflicts on them immediate, continuing, and real injuries that outrun and belie any legitimate justifications that may be claimed for it. We conclude that, in addition to the far-reaching deficiencies of Amendment 2 that we have noted, the principles it offends, in another sense, are conventional and venerable; a law must bear a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose, Kadrmas v. Dickinson Public Schools, 487 U. S. 450, 462 (1988), and Amendment 2 does not."

"Do you think things outside the United States cannot be relevant to an understanding of how to apply the American Constitution? That's what's at issue. What is at issue is the extent to which you might learn from other places facts that would help you apply the Constitution of the United States. And in today's world, as I've said, where experiences are becoming more and more similar, I think that there is often -- not a lot, not always -- but in a finite number of instances there is something to learn about how to interpret this document."

"Very, Very Wrong... I wrote a dissent — and that's the way it works... [the court's decision was procedural] and so we'll see what happens in that area when we get a substantive matter in front of us"

"[S]omething I enjoy is talking to [all kinds of students]. And they'll . . . ask me . . . "What is it you find particularly meaningful about your job?" . . . [W]hat I say to them is: Look, I sit there on the bench, and after we hear lots of cases [it becomes apparent that this] is a complicated country; there are more than 330 million people. And my mother used to say, "It's every race. It's every religion." And she would emphasize this: "And it's every point of view possible." . . . [I]t's a kind of miracle when you sit there and see all of those people in front of you - people that are so different in what they think. And yet, they've decided to help solve their major differences under law. And when the students [I speak to] get too cynical, I say, "Go look at what happens in countries that don't do that.""

"I take this around at my job. (Holds up a copy of the US Constitution.) People have come to accept this Constitution, and they've come to accept the importance of a rule of law. And [I] say: Look, of course people don't agree, but we have a country that is based on human rights, democracy, and so forth. . . . I'll tell you what Lincoln thought, what Washington thought, and what people today still think: It's an experiment. . . . It's an experiment that's still going on. You know who will see whether that experiment works? It's you, my friend. . . . It's that next generation, and the one after that - my grandchildren and their children. They'll determine whether the experiment still works. And, of course, I am an optimist. . . . I'm pretty sure it will."

"Today, Justice Breyer announces his intention to step down from active service after four decades . . . on the federal bench and 28 years on the United States Supreme Court. His legacy includes his work as a leading scholar and jurist in administrative law [and] his stature as a beacon of wisdom on our Constitution and what it means. . . . He’s written landmark opinions on topics ranging from reproductive rights to healthcare, to voting rights, to patent laws, to laws protecting our environment, and the laws that protect our religious practices. His opinions are practical, sensible, and nuanced. . . . Justice Breyer’s law clerks and his colleagues . . . describe him and his work ethic - his desire to learn more, his kindness to those around him, and his optimism for the promise of our country. . . . Justice Breyer has been everything his country could have asked of him."

"ONCE A MONTH, I open e-mail with an extra rush on anticipation. It’s usually the day after my column, “The Doctor Files,” runs in the Health Section of the Los Angeles Times. Because the column shares true stories as well as the emotional side of doctoring, it invariably touches someone. Sometimes I receive as many as 20 responses—positive and negative. I might go through a dozen drafts to produce my final 800-word version, but I consider the time well spent. Revealing medicine’s humanity and inner workings to readers has become, in a way, my personal crusade. I’m an infectious diseases and tropical medicine specialist. Since 1987, I’ve also been a broadcast journalist, a lay lecturer, a magazine writer, and a columnist. I didn’t set out to combine medicine and communications. In fact, 17 years ago, as a rookie ID attending, the possibility of someday linking two careers never crossed my mind. ... If you want to tool up, fine; there are many avenues to learning the crafts of print and broadcast journalism, even acting classes and Toastmasters to aid effective public speaking. But the foremost key is discovering your own message and passion, whether it be antibiotic use and abuse, food and water safety, or vaccination. Most importantly, never underestimate the power of a human story, simply and honestly told. And in infectious diseases, do we have stories."

"The truth is, medical doctors are more likely to commit suicide than any other professional group. But facing this fact remains largely taboo. Fear of stigma is one reason broken healers often hide or self-treat their pain (with substances legal and not). Fear of repercussion from hospitals and licensing boards is another. Why certain physicians kill themselves is harder to parse. Are they melancholy from the get-go — or does work push them over the edge? Although research suggests that many doctors are emotionally muted, experts also believe they start life with no greater risk of depression than anyone else. Yet once a day, on average, an American physician takes his or her life."

"Dengue incidence has increased thirty-fold over the last fifty years. Fifty percent of the world's population is theoretically at risk."

"For those who wish to write, the craft of writing is a life-long journey."

"There was a period of time when we were starting OpenAI when I wasn’t exactly sure how the progress would continue. But I had one very explicit belief, which is: one doesn’t bet against deep learning. Somehow, every time you run into an obstacle, within six months or a year researchers find a way around it."

"I’ve always been inspired and motivated by the idea. It wasn’t called AGI back then, but you know, like, having a neural network do everything. I didn’t always believe that they could. But it was the mountain to climb."

"... the safeguards he wants to design: a machine that looks upon people the way parents look on their children. “In my opinion, this is the gold standard,” he says. “It is a generally true statement that people really care about children.” (Does he have children? “No, but I want to,” he says.)"

"It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious."

"I lead a very simple life. I go to work; then I go home. I don’t do much else. There are a lot of social activities one could engage in, lots of events one could go to. Which I don’t."

"In a nutshell, I had the realization that if you train, a large neural network on a large and a deep neural network on a big enough dataset that specifies some complicated task that people do, such as vision, then you will succeed necessarily. And the logic for it was irreducible; we know that the human brain can solve these tasks and can solve them quickly. And the human brain is just a neural network with slow neurons. So, then we just need to take a smaller but related neural network and train it on the data. And the best neural network inside the computer will be related to the neural network that we have in our brains that performs this task."

"The thing you really want is for the human teachers that teach the AI to collaborate with an AI. You might want to think of it as being in a world where the human teachers do 1% of the work and the AI does 99% of the work. You don't want it to be 100% AI. But you do want it to be a human-machine collaboration, which teaches the next machine."

"Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word “singularity” is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is going to be a gradual process. And gradual processes are hard to notice. I believe the merge has already started, and we are a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think."

"We are already in the phase of co-evolution — the AIs affect, effect, and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power and run the AI on it, and it figures out how to build even better chips."

"More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves."

"The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario. If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else."

"Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like."

"It’s probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate—the most surprising thing I’ve learned working on OpenAI is just how correlated increasing computing power and AI breakthroughs are—and the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast."

"Trust the exponential. Flat looking backwards, vertical looking forwards."

"Regulation will be crucial, and it will take time to understand this. Although the artificial intelligence tools of our generation are not particularly frightening, I think that we are not so far away from those that could potentially be."

"Do we make sure AI is a tool that has proper safeguards as it gets really powerful? (November 23, 2023)"

"I aspect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes."

"I think AGI will be the best tool humanity has yet created. With it, we will be able to solve all sorts of problems. We'll be able to express ourselves in new creative ways. We'll make just incredible things for each other, for ourselves, for the world, for kind of this unfolding human story. And it's new, and anything new comes with change and change is not always all easy. But I think this will be just absolutely tremendous upside. And in nine more years if you're nice enough to invite me back, you'll roll this question and people will say, "How could we have thought we didn't want this?""

"I’m a Midwestern Jew. I think that fully explains my exact mental model—very optimistic, and prepared for things to go super wrong at any point."

"I’m reasonably optimistic about solving the technical alignment problem. We still have a lot of work to do but you know I feel …better and better over time, not worse and worse."

"I think what we believe in very strongly, is that keeping the rate of change in the world relatively constant, rather than, say, go build AGI in secret and then deploy it all at once when you’re done, is much better. This idea that people relatively gradually have time to get used to this incredible new thing that is going to transform so much of the world, get a feel for it, have time to update. You know, institutions and people do not update very well overnight. They need to be part of its evolution, to provide critical feedback, to tell us when we’re doing dumb mistakes, to find the areas of great benefit and potential harm, to make our mistakes and learn our lessons when the stakes are lower than they will be in the future. Although we still would like to avoid them as much as we can, of course. And I don’t just mean we, I mean the field as a whole, sort of understanding, as with any new technology, where the tricky parts are going to be.."

"In a well functioning society, governments would be doing the AGI project and [nuclear] fusion and a whole bunch of things — and yet they’re not. So we either sit around and watch the gradual decline of state capacity and say ‘that’s a bummer’ and we’re just not going to have any more technical progress . . . or you do the next best thing and just build great companies."

"Is [AI] gonna be like the printing press that diffused knowledge, power, and learning widely across the landscape that empowered ordinary, everyday individuals that led to greater flourishing, that led above all two greater liberty? Or is it gonna be more like the atom bomb – huge technological breakthrough, but the consequences (severe, terrible) continue to haunt us to this day?"

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

"We face serious risk. We face existential risk. The challenge that the world has is how we’re going to manage those risks and make sure we still get to enjoy those tremendous benefits. No one wants to destroy the world. Let's make sure we come together as a globe — and I hope this place can play a real role in this. We talk about the IAEA as a model where the world has said 'OK, very dangerous technology, let's all put some guard rails.' And I think we can do both. I think in this case, it's a nuanced message 'cause it's saying it's not that dangerous today but it can get dangerous fast. But we can thread that needle."

"I genuinely hope the best for [Elon Musk], in spite of everything."

"One area that I'm particularly interested personally in open source for is I want an open source model that is as good as it can be, that runs on my phone, and that I think is going to, you know...the world doesn't quite have the technology for a good version of that yet, but that seems like a really important thing to go do at some point."

"It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there."

"When bubbles occur, smart people get overly excited about a grain of truth. If you look at most bubbles in history, like the technology bubble, there was something real there. Technology was really important. The internet was really a big thing. People got too excited about it."

"All of these claims are utterly untrue."

"The San Francisco-based company said late Tuesday that it “reached an agreement in principle” for co-founder Sam Altman to return as CEO under a different board of directors"

"“I would not have thought that Broadway was in my future, so it’s a blessing,”"

"When I became First Lady, she was very gracious to me. She was just wonderful about saying, ‘Continue your own work.’ ”"

"“The thing that I bring to this play, from both my life as a reporter and my life as a participant, is that a campaign is an adrenaline-drenched circumstance,”"

"Over a bowl of pumpkin soup. “It’s intense. It’s creative. You go down this particular road with these particular obstacles once and only once.”"

"When I was in Miami, President Carter was running for reëlection. I had interviewed Miss Lillian and the Carters’ sons when I was working in Columbus. There was going to be a press conference with him, and my news director assigned my male co-anchor to cover it. So I went to my news director and said, ‘Is there a reason why you asked Steve to do this?’ He didn’t even know he’d done it. I was, like, ‘I just want to make sure that you think about it the next time.’ ”"

"Candice is so good that I really and truly hope that she stays totally healthy,”“if it was to happen, you know, I’ll be ready.”"

"Due to personal family circumstances, I have decided to postpone my performance in The Vagina Monologues. I will work with the show's producers and director to set a date to join another team of esteemed actresses in the future.""

"Keeping the Faith" and "The People Vs. Larry Flint" and such soaps as "As the World Turns" and "One Life to Live.""

""Told me he was divorced, was going to be in town for some business. Would I have coffee with him?" said Hanover. "So, we took a long walk in Central Park, and he said to me, "I'm so sorry I made you cry all those years ago.'"

"And I was stunned, because, you know, you stop waiting for an apology after three, four months!""

"Today's turn of events brings me great sadness," Hanover told reporters after learning of the separation from the media. "I had hoped to keep this marriage together."

"I think about marketing as telling the story of what you're doing and why it might be valuable for someone. I think both [marketing and design] influence the other because, at the end of the day, the constituent is that you're thinking about the customer.”"

"“You're trying to empathize with [the customers to] get in their heads understand what their psychology is. What do they want? What do they need? You want to know that so that you can tell them the compelling story about why your product might be a great fit for what they need.”"

"“I always love this practice to write the press release or marketing brief because you want to know before building something how you will talk about it. If your story or brief isn’t compelling and doesn’t get people excited, then maybe you shouldn't build this thing.”"

"A lot of marketing's work is trying to help us understand. What is that narrative? We're telling what’s going to be compelling so that customers become directly influenced by the product.”"

"thumb|Julie Zhuo Collision Conf 2018 02“The brand is the impression that people have of your product and service. Whether they love it or whether they don't, you want people to know how they feel about your brand.”"

"“Product designers will say, ‘I'm not a brand person.’ No, the product that you're building is going to be 80% of what people take away as the brand. They have to be completely linked in that manner.”"

"“If we're successful, we’ll be enabling many other companies across the world to fulfill their mission and make better decisions for their business. Hopefully, build better products for people because ultimately [that’s] the thing that matters.”"

"I can easily tell if this is the kind of person who goes [and] approaches new opportunities with a growth mindset,” she says. “Are they excited to learn? Are they introspective, and do they take lessons from what’s happened in the past?”"

"Well, if you can go back to the very beginning and change anything about how you went through it, what would you do differently?”"

"“Hey, tell me about a hard situation — something really challenging that you went through in the last year or last two years.”"

"But what I realized was, I don’t really care about selling books,”"

"“What does interest me is trying to help save the lives of people who might not have the tools, the money, the skills, or the contacts themselves.”"

"As someone who was always attracted to oncology, to be able to take my field, my research, and my connections to help save lives — that was extremely gratifying,”"

"In my own burnout and depression after this — because it was soul-crushing — Amit was showing me that there is power in humor, there is power in levity,” Aaker says. “I was seeing that if you don’t have enough humor and levity, you will burn out. That put me on a new research journey around understanding the behavioral science of humor — when and why it works.”"

"That was not a surprise to me, personally,” Aaker says, “because I think subconsciously or not, I did try to create these different eras in my life and also in my research.”"

"I saw parents that said, ‘I just want my kid to be happy,’” Aaker says. “Or I saw people getting depressed when they realized they were low and thought they should be happy, and then were doubly depressed because they weren’t. That got me thinking about whether there might be a difference between short-run happiness and what’s truly meaningful.”"

"The result is clickbait rather than substance; life hacks rather than holistic solutions; echo-chambers than generate radicalism rather than understanding,” she said in a talk she gave to Stanford HAI in 2020. “And we are more susceptible than ever to short-term design serving up a stream of addictive content. Like junk food, technology serves up a sugar rush but fails to nourish us.”"

"The way I learn is by teaching a new class,” she says. “That’s why I shift.”"

"What we’re doing with this beautiful mindset research is diving more deeply into people’s subjective experience,” Aaker says. “Now, think about how interesting that is relative to AI — AI is not going to be able to have subjective experiences, at least for a while. This idea of what defines the human subjective experience is going to be a blossoming topic for the next decade or so. And I’m hoping this window of research will be able to add to that conversation — in a way that anyone could feel connected to.”"

"To be able to take my research and my connections to help save lives — that was extremely gratifying."

"The United States wants to keep secret the fact that this court issued a search warrant for Representative Perry’s phone,". “But the fact that this court issued a search warrant is already public knowledge."

"We have laid the groundwork for an ambitious and balanced multilateral agreement in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round."

"I am proud of USTR’s accomplishments in opening markets,as well as its excellent record of enforcing our trade agreements. This Administration will leave behind an exceptionally strong, pro-trade organization that will support the new U.S. Trade Representative as he continues to build on those accomplishments."

"What physics explains the enormous disparity between the gravitational scale and the typical mass scale of the elementary particles?"

"... there's an argument that the Standard Model plus gravity is all there is, and the has nothing to do with nature. And that argument is that the properties of the world, the properties of particle physics in particular, are determined partly ... largely? ... by a ."

"... a very special type of falsehood common in explanations of physics for nonexperts ... a physics fib or, more simply, a phib. Phibs are often found in articles and books about the universe. They arise when well-intentioned physicists, faced with a nonexpert's question, are trying to concoct a short, memorable tale to serve as a compromise between giving no answer at all and giving a correct but incomprehensible one."

"... Are we thinking about the wrong? Are we thinking about quantum field theory wrong? Are there particles at the Large Hadron Collider that are hiding from us? ... It's true that the Large Hadron Collider has vast data sets. And when you have a gigantic amount of data, if you don't ask exactly the right question, you might not see what's actually in there. So, we have to be very thoughtful about all the different questions that we should ask of this data."

"You won’t always have everything you need to get where you want to go, to attain your goals and your mission, so you need to start with the little that you do have or the privilege that you have."

"I am an Africanist; everything African is what I am, who I am."

"The thing I love most is connecting people, and my current mission is all about African youth."

"Youth unemployment is particularly important to me because it’s what I live with every day"

"The critical thing for me is learning how to leverage what you have"

"it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep"

"Burgum, 68, suspended his long-shot presidential bid last year and quickly endorsed Trump, developing a strong personal and political relationship with the president-elect. After Trump asked oil industry executives to help steer $1 billion toward his campaign, Burgum talked extensively with oil donors and CEOs, and he helped lead the campaign’s development of its energy policy."

"Governor Burgum understands Indian country and the challenges we face, such as the need for public safety, better tribal education and economic development in Indian country, among other needs,” said David Flute, former chair of the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. Flute is now secretary of the South Dakota Department of Tribal Relations."

"When I finish writing a novel, I find myself wanting to head in a new direction. That’s why after writing Rules of Civility—which describes a year in the life of a young woman about to climb New York’s socioeconomic ladder—I was eager to write A Gentleman in Moscow—which describes three decades in the life of a Russian aristocrat who’s just lost everything. The Lincoln Highway allowed me to veer again in that the novel focuses on three eighteen-year-old boys on a journey in 1950s America that lasts only ten days. The reason I make a shift like this is because it forces me to retool almost every element of my craft. By changing the , the era, and the cast of characters, I also must change the narrative’s perspective, tone, and poetics so that they will be true to these people in this situation at this moment in time. Similarly, by changing the duration of the tale—from a year to thirty years to ten days—the structure, pacing, and scope of thematic discovery all have to change."

"I think that, for the most part, I've have always tried to keep my focus on telling a story without worrying about what it might mean to others. ... Some people really write towards having a message. And, for me it's always been, when someone says, 'What is your book about?' — if I could say to them what my book was about in a few sentences, that book would be a failure — for sure."

"(quote at 6:53 of 58:49)"

"The 1930s . . . What a grueling decade that was. I was sixteen when the began, just old enough to have had all my dreams and expectations duped by the effortless glamour of the twenties. It was as if America launched the Depression just to teach a lesson. After the , you couldn't hear the bodies hitting the pavement, but there was a sort of communal gasp and then a stillness that fell over the city like snow. The bands laid down their instruments and the crowds made quietly for the door. ... Poverty and powerlessness. Hunger and hopelessness. At least until the omen of war began to lighten our step."

"Eve Ross . . . Eve was one of those surprising beauties from the . In New York it becomes so easy to assume that the city's most alluring women have flown in from Paris or . But they're just a minority. A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter I—like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs. Every morning in early spring one of them skips off her porch with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane ready to flag down the first headed to —this city where all things beautiful are welcomed and measured and, if not immediately adopted, then at least tried on for size."

"In three bestselling novels over eight years, Amor Towles has established himself as one of our most beloved contemporary novelists, exhibiting a chameleon-esque ability to inhabit vastly different settings and s in a style uniquely his own, yet never the same from book to book."

"We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino makes. We have to be that good, in the future."

"There’s a lot of leverage in the system, there’s a lot of cash, but then there’s a whole bunch of other folks who are trying to build these data centers. Whether there’s the energy component side of it, or whether you think about the real estate component, I mean, there’s just a whole lot of things happening at one time. [...] Are we in an AI bubble? Of course, we are. We are hyped, we’re accelerating, we’re putting enormous leverage into the system,” Gelsinger answered. “With that said, I don’t see it ending for several years. I do think we have an industry shift to AI. As Jensen (Huang) talked about, and I agree with this, you know that businesses are yet to really start materially benefiting from [it]. We’re displacing all of the internet and the service provider industry as we think about it today — we have a long way to go."

"Quantum computing will pop the AI bubble."

"Historical capitalism is not a system in which state power is abolished or in which states never interfere with market forces. Rather it is a system in which the most successful competitors use state power to facilitate capitalist accumulation. This does not mean that taxation and tribute are abolished, but rather that they are utilized to support the search for profit-making opportunities in the world market."

"National societies (both their states and their nations) have emerged over the last few centuries to become the strongest socially constructed identities and organizations in the modern world, but they have never been whole systems."

"Thirty years ago, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein pointed out that revolutionaries rarely attain their demands immediately. Rather what happens is that ‘enlightened conservatives’ implement the demands of the most recent previous world revolution in order to cool out the challenges of a current world revolution. This is the way in which world revolutions produce the evolution of global governance"

"A resistance to formal organization is common among the Left, as we have seen not only in the but also in phenomena like Occupy and the Arab Spring. Activists sought to intentionally avoid the inherent conservatism of institutions, which can often fight to maintain their own self-interest and internal power structure. But the avoidance of organization hamstrings any movement’s ability to achieve its own goals."

"...These are exciting times. Another World Revolution is happening. The Global Right and the Global Left are once again contending with each other and with centrist liberalism. It is different this time around, but imagination and perseverance will be rewarded, as they were in the World Revolution of 1917. As my old friend often said, a luta continua. (2020)"

"Science, that was going to save the world in H. G. Wells' time, is regimented, strait-jacketed, scared shitless, its universal language diminished to one word, security."

"The western mind — and perhaps the American mind in particular — has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone."

"The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control."

"The systematic study of social numbers in the spirit of natural philosophy was pioneered during the 1660s, and was known for about a century and a half as political arithmetic. Its purpose, when not confined to the calculation of insurance or rates, was the promotion of sound, well-informed state policy. ... , who invented the phrase "political arithmetic" and is thought by many to have had a hand in the composition of 's work, was in full accord with his friend as to the purpose of these studies. Political arithmetic was, in his view, the application of Baconian principles to the art of government."

"Although ' seems to work as a memorable , it can mislead. The book is not about implicit trust, but reluctance and hesitation. Numbers that appear sufficiently routine may pass under the radar, but when conflicting interests are at stake, they are readily challenged. They often require . This typically involves putting aside deep meanings and convictions in favor of compromise and convention. The title came to me in reaction to my editor's suggestion of "Truth in Numbers," which I rejected at once."

"Beginning in 1892, when he took up statistics as his scientific vocation, Karl Pearson devoted himself relentlessly to a project of almost universal quantification. This work, the invention of a , defined one of the landmark transitions in the history of the sciences, or indeed of public rationality."

"A bitter debate in the early twentieth century between "biometricians" and "Mendelians" about how best to study seemed to end in a victory for genetics, defined by a focus on discrete nuggets of hereditary causation for which in 1909 coined the term "." The new genetics emphasized , , and s. Despite geneticists' intense engagement with eugenics and medicine, Homo sapiens was not their preferred organism. It was too resistant to laboratory manipulation and had too long a generation time in comparison to , s, and viruses."

"Our scientific culture, and much of our public life, is based on trust in numbers. They are commonly accepted as the means to achieving objectivity in analysis, certainty in conclusions, and truth. Numbers tell us about the health of our society (as in the rates of occurrence of unwanted behavior), and they provide a demarcation between what is accepted as safe and what is believed to be dangerous. In Trust in Numbers, Theodore Porter ... unpacks this assumption and uses history to show how such a trust may sometimes be based less on the solidity of the numbers themselves than on the needs of expert and client communities. ... Porter is to be congratulated for showing how intimate can be the mixture of , real and pseudo-quantification, awareness and self-deception, and vision and fantasy, in the invocation of trust in numbers. His historical insights can provide the materials we need for a debate on quality in quantities, a debate which is long overdue."

"I hold two fundamental beliefs close to my heart,” she explains. “First, I’m a technology explorationist. I believe in pushing technology as far as possible because that’s how society progresses. Second, ignoring the inevitable is the worst decision we can make."

"Winning the Google Science Competition was a pivotal moment for me. It not only validated my belief that young people can drive significant change, but also opened doors to a global platform where I could advocate for sustainability. The experience taught me that innovation paired with advocacy can create meaningful impact."

"My advice is simple: start small, but think big. We can’t tackle sustainability challenges overnight, but every action matters."

"The human waste management systems,” she says. “Watching them transform materials that would have otherwise been waste into nourishing food for fish was inspiring."

"Finding uses for things that would otherwise wind up as pollution in the environment became personal"

"It will take decades to transition our sources of energy, and some industrial emissions have an inherently high carbon cost that may never go away, such as the manufacturing of steel, glass and cement,” Etosha says. “Carbon transformation closes the loop and helps curb the impact of such emissions."

"What we’re doing is essentially industrial photosynthesis,” Etosha says. “We’re transforming carbon dioxide in a manner analogous to what plants do, and the result is carbon compounds and oxygen."

"This support will help us to build a megawatt-sized building block or module that can process two thousand tons of carbon dioxide a year"

"We’re still in early days,” she says. “But we believe carbon transformation to be a critical part of a comprehensive climate strategy."

"What a lot of airlines and large Fortune 500 companies are realizing is that the aviation sector is very hard to decarbonize,” Cave said at the CES tech trade show in January. Solutions such as battery-powered planes and hydrogen will take years to come to scale"

"I admire the leaders who can rise to the need of the moment. Whether it is empathy when their team needs to be listened to, inspiration that motivates large groups to do great things, or patience when things go awry, great leaders can switch into each mode."

"I kind of saw myself as being a scientist in a lab and developing something new and novel helping deploy it as part of a larger company"

"We’re going to keep innovating and seeing how we can fill a void that’s out there involving speech and sound.” — Carol Espy-Wilson, founder and CTO of OmniSpeech"

"I became interested in noise problems while attending a workshop at NSF. People from various companies discussed issues with deploying speech technology over VOIP and dealing with everyday noise."

"Because of my training at MIT where we focused on understanding what’s unique about speech and understanding how it is produced. I could use my knowledge to deal with removing noise to help improve voice communications."

"Many engineers treat speech like it’s any other signal when it is not. As a professor, I had a couple of Ph.D. students who did dissertations in this area, and I had a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard for a year where I could put all of it together into a solution."

"You know one of the things I can say is that to get a doctorate — I have my doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT– you have to be willing to work hard and also have to be passionate about what you’re doing."

"You have to know it’s your calling because it’s not easy in this area particularly when most of the people around you don’t look like you. You will run into hostility. There will be people who think you should not be there, and I had my share of experiences like that."

"You must have confidence in yourself, and for me my spiritual grounding was very important, knowing that God loves me as much as he loves anybody else and that He’ll fight battles I can’t. I’m not in a room to fight. I just believe in myself, and I believe in Him. Some of the groups I was a part of at MIT never had a woman or an African American before."

"Even on the train we began to feel the grateful influence of restful country life. From the windows we watched the , the wayside flowers, and the , engaged in the surprising occupation of following the plow. At our station, a sang his sweet strain from a telegraph pole; we could hear s calling from the marshes. We took the only wagon that met the train, and drove through the village. It was a typical Mormon village, one of a line of closely connected settlements running along the valley between the and the ."

"New Mexico has the distinction of being the first State in the Union from which bird notes were recorded by white men. These notes refer to birds seen on the in 1540, three hundred and eighty-eight years ago, eighty-two years before the first recorded birds were seen in New England (see 's New English Canaan, printed in 1637). The actual study of the birds of New Mexico has attracted naturalists from the the days of the earliest explorations that crossed parts of New Mexico, the first records being made on the . ... The systematic survey of New Mexico was definitely undertaken in 1903, under the direction of , then Chief of the Biological Survey; and , who had just completed a survey of the adjoining State of Texas, .. was put in charge of the work."

"The amazing views of the naturally dominate and absorb the attention of the hurried visitor to the canyon rims, but between views the bird-minded may hear arresting songs and cath glimpses of feathered passers-by that will add intimate pleasures to the memories of the "great abyss." After a night in the familiar song of the may be heard on awakening, followed by the happy song of the rosy well associated with the sunshine of the Southwest. Then perhaps will come the coarse croak of the , adding a grateful bass note to the ."

"A tribute to Florence Merriam Bailey (1863-1948), a passionate ornithologist who revolutionized the way scientists and general nature lovers study birds. Keating introduces Florence as a child who was delighted to sit patiently in the woods to watch birds and take careful notes on their features and behavior. As an adult, she is outraged by the fashion of and killing birds in order to study them. She popularized bird watching and promoted protective legislation. She turned her years of note taking into field guides for professionals and the general public alike."

"Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.”"

"It is only when we forget the ideas behind building something wonderful that we can actually do the building that makes things wonderful.”"

"reuse is properly a process issue, and individual organizations need to decide whether they believe in its long-term benefits."

"The problem with traditional approaches to abstraction and encapsulation is that they aim at complete information hiding. This characteristic anticipates being able to eliminate programming from parts of the software development process, those parts contained within module boundaries. As we've seen, though, the need to program is never eliminated because customization, modification, and maintenance are always required-that is, piecemeal growth."

"reuse is easiest within a project instead of between them. A manager's success depends on performance on a given project and not on performance over several projects. And preparing code for reuse requires additional work, not only by the reuse expert but also by developers. Therefore, preparing for reuse has a cost for any given project."

"Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug-fixers, and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently."

"One of the primary reasons that abstraction is overloved is that a completed program full of the right abstractions is perfectly beautiful. But there are very few completed programs, because programs are written, maintained, bugs are fixed, features are added, performance is tuned, and a whole variety of changes are made both by the original and new programming team members. Thus, the way a program looks in the end is not important because there is rarely an end, and if there is one it isn't planned."

"The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing"

"OK, so what's my research goal? I come from the machines end of this world, roughly. And what I really want to do is figure out how it is that we can make intelligent robots. And I do this mostly because I'm interested in intelligence more than I'm interested actually in robots. But I think that trying to make a physical agent who goes out and interacts in the world is a really good test bed for understanding what kinds of reasoning and perception and control we need in order to make it an intelligent system."

"So the way I think about the problems-- this is kind of a definitely a computer scientist way to think about the problem-- is to think about the robot as a transducer, as some kind of a system that's connected up to the world. And it makes observations of the world. And it takes actions that change the state of the world. And presumably, there's some objective, right? We want to take actions that change the state of the world in some way that we think will be good."

"The reason I want to start by backing all the way up to this like very basic control theory picture is that right now there's an enormous amount of argument about how one should make robots. Should they do planning and reasoning? Should they do reinforcement learning? How should we do it? So there's a huge kind of crisis almost in the field about what the best methods are. And what I want to start out this talk by doing is actually thinking about how we can answer that question in a way that's not political or religious, but technical."

"So the way I want to think about this, the job of this program. So I'm going to make a robot. I'm going to put a program in the head of the robot. So let's say, I'm not going to worry about hardware. I'm just going to read about the software. And so the program that I'm going to put in the head of my robot, it has to do this job that's written in the formula up here. And what this is just shorthand for saying is that it has to represent some kind of mapping from observation and actions that it's had in the past. So o, a star means the whole history of observations and actions that it's ever had. Based on that, it has to pick the next action. So that's not really saying much of anything at all. That's just a description of every single robot control program basically that's been written. You have to take your history of actions and observations, compute the next action."

"And so what we want to do is think about first of all, what's the best-- what would be the best pi to put inside the robot. How can we think about that? And then we have to think about the problem of how is it that we, in my case, as me, as an engineer, I'm going to find that pi that I should put in my robot."

"So one way to think about the whole problem set up then is that I, as the robotics engineer, have to do for my robots the job that nature did for you. That is to say, I have to think about I'm a robot factory. I'm going to make these robots. And the robots are going to go out in the world. Maybe they're going to go and work in people's Kitchens or something. And every kitchen is going to be different. So there's going to be a lot that I don't know about the world. But somehow, I have to figure out the best program, what program, to put in the head of all my robots, so that when they go out in the world to behave, they can do a good job so that's the way I think about the problem that I face. And in order to think about what would be the best program, I kind of think about it this way."

"So I imagine that there's some distribution over possible environments that the robot could find itself in when it actually goes out into the world, right? So maybe it's going to go to houses and the houses are all somewhat different. And once I put that program in the house, maybe it's going to do some estimation or learning. It's going to adapt to the circumstances it's in. My job is to find a program that does a good job of adapting in all the environments that might find itself in."

"So imagine that you have some kind of probability distribution over the worlds that the robot could actually end up operating in. I want to find a program that's going to behave well, let's say get a lot of reward in expectation on average over all the environments that it could possibly find itself in. So that's, I would say, kind of a reasonable formal objective for a robot. And one thing that's good about this as an objective is that we don't have to argue about it, right? It doesn't say whether there should be learning in there or what kind of learning or should it be a genetic algorithm or should it have planning. In some sense, you could say, "I just want to make the program that's going to be the best that can be on average over these environments.""

"But the problem is now I've written down an objective function. I've said, "Oh, if you could tell me a distribution over possible worlds that you'd like this program to work well in, then I know in a certain mathematical sense with the best program is." But now my problem as the engineer, as the person who is in the robot factory, which is again, the kind of maybe analogous to the problem of nature, is I have to figure out how do I how do I find this program that's going to be good and all these situations?"

"So there are a bunch of ways you can think about the problem. I mean, one would be to say, "Oh, I'm really lazy. I don't really want to think very much about working in the factory. It seems awfully hard. I will just make a robot that has roughly an empty head. It doesn't really know very much at all. And then it just has to interact in the world and learn everything by interacting." But of course, you don't really want a robot that comes to your kitchen and begins to learn about physics, right? That would break a lot of dishes."

"Another strategy-- and this is like the classic engineering strategy-- is that, no, I'm like a serious engineer. And I'm going to sit here and think really, really hard. And I'm going to write a program. And it's going to be a great program. And I'm just going to put it straight in the robot's head. And it's going to go off, and it's going to be awesome and do everything it needs to do. And that strategy actually can work very well in certain kinds of problems. It lets that, the Boston dynamics robots do Parkour. But as we try to address bigger and more complicated problems, it becomes harder and harder for engineers to just straight up write the program."

"We could just try to figure out how humans work because humans work pretty well in a variety of domains. And so one program would be to say, "Well, we forget how humans work. And then that's what we do. We make robots that work like that." So first of all, that's a hard biology problem. I think it's very important that people work on it. But it's also not a general engineering methodology because for instance, I might want robots that work in certain kinds of circumstances or problem domains that are really different from the niche that humans are well tuned for. And so I might want to make a robot that isn't really human-like in its intelligence. And then it seems like what we're left with that maybe we could just say, well, we'll somehow recapitulate evolution. Like we just search around in the space of programs and try to find ones that work well and then eventually get ones that are great for our environment. But that seems slow and complicated."

"So if I enumerate my options and they all don't look very good, I don't know what to do. So one thing to think about, though, is this last thing. So the kind of evolution idea. So let's just pursue this a little bit more. So imagine that we want to try to find a program that works well in expectation over all environments. One way to think about that is that inside the factory, we kind of simulate a bunch of environments. We try a bunch of robot programs. And we try to find one that works well in all those environments. And that's like a really interesting strategy. We would have to think of a space of possible programs for the robot, some objective function. We figure out, well, what are we trying to optimize, a distribution over problems to test."

"In some sense, this is a thing that people have thought about for a long time, right? This would be like running some kind of evolutionary algorithm or some search or simulation inside the factory. And it's very attractive, but I think generally speaking, hard to make work well. So the question is what should I do, right? I could maybe I can set up this whole evolutionary setup somehow. And then I could just snooze for a really long time while some very complicated program tries to figure out the best robot program to put in the head of the robot. But I don't know. I am simultaneously too impatient for that."

"And so then the question is can I somehow take pieces and parts of all these ideas, some human programming, some robot learning in the wild, some kind of search or evolution offline, some inspiration from humans. Can I take all those things and put them together and see if I can find a way to engineer intelligent robots? So that's basically what I'm up to."

"I'm going to-- well, no. OK, let me say something about this. So then the one way to view the research agenda is to say that first of all, I'd like to be inspired by what we know about humans. And in particular, I'm very interested in this bulky core knowledge type stuff because that tells me something about what evolution, in some sense, saw fit to engineer into natural intelligences. And if I understand that natural systems seem to be born with a bias or some built in structure to think in terms of other agents, to understand that they move through 3D space, to talk about, think about objects as clumps of matter that cohere, that's a very helpful engineering bias for building a system."

"I also know just some physics and variance about the worlds that my robot's going to operate in. And maybe humans don't have this built in explicitly, but they almost surely have a built in implicitly. And I also have some other constraints as an engineer who's trying to make intelligent robots, which is that humans are the engineers, right?"

"So if humans have to engineer a very complicated system, then it has to be the engineering process has to have some modularity to it because humans are really bad at understanding one big messy system. They're good at understanding pieces and parts that work together. So it may be that we have to take a modular design approach in our engineering efforts for intelligence, not because the intelligence needs to have that architecture, but because we, the human engineers, need those tools for actually building a system."

"So all these constraints need to somehow come together into a way of building intelligence systems. Actually, I would stop here for a minute just because it's a convenient spot and see if there are questions. I see some red Q&A button. So maybe someone can ask."

"Yeah, actually. For years there has been. So a more typical formalization would be in terms of predictive models and planning or reasoning. So reinforcement learning. Also, it depends. The phrase unfortunately, the phrase, "reinforcement learning," grows and stretches too. And sometimes for many people and in many discourses, it's come to mean all of intelligent behavior, in which case, I would say, well, no it's all reinforcement learning. But that's vacuous. Other formulations involve reasoning about objects and their relationships and thinking about the long term consequences of taking actions in the world and so on. So there's really different ways of framing and formalizing the problem. And they give you very different computational profiles and different learning strategies. OK, good."

"So I'll just tell you some story because people usually like stories, and it's kind of the afternoon. So and this is related to the question about reinforcement learning, probably, right? So how did I get into this whole thing? When I just finished my undergraduate degree, which actually was in philosophy, weirdly enough, I went to work at a research institute while I was starting my PhD. And they had this robot nobody really knew actually very much about robotics. So And it was my job as the brand new person to try to get the robot to drive down the hallway."

"And so what happened was I programmed the robot. And it would run into the wall. And I would bring it back. And I would fix the programming. And it would run into the wall again, hopefully for a slightly different reason. And over the course of a couple of weeks, I managed to write a program that would use these funny sonar sensors on the robot and make it drive down the hall without crashing into the walls. And so that was good. And I was happy, in a way, at the end of that, that I had gotten it to work. But I reflected on that a bit more. And what I decided was that I had learned how to navigate down the hallway using the sonar sensors. And what I thought was that-- and it had taken a long time. And I was kind of a hassle. And really, the system should have been doing the learning, not me. So my view was that I should figure out a way to get out of the loop to build systems that could learn on their own to do stuff. And then I could just wait for them to do that. And that would be better. So that was flaky."

"Then I sort of reinvented reinforcement learning in a not very good way, really. But it was kind of entertaining. And I this is a slide by the way for those young people in the audience. You might know, but back in the day, we used to write with colored depends on pieces of clear plastic. And that's what we used to give talks. So I had this kind of pseudo reinforcement learning thing. And by 1990, I actually had this little robot called Spanky that did actual reinforcement learning during my actual defense. So it didn't learn anything too complicated. But it did do it in real time. So that was kind of fun."

"So OK, I finished my PhD. And I thought, OK, I know something about robot learning now. But I really want to make robots that can do complicated things. And I couldn't figure out how to get basic reinforcement learning methods to really scale up to problems that I cared about. And so this is one last flight. I'll show you from some talk that I gave in 1995. And I kind of complained that the ideal that you could take just a big bunch of what I like to call neural goo now, just a big bunch of generic neural network stuff, and train it to be an intelligent agent all by itself. But that wasn't going to be feasible. And instead, we needed some kind of compositional structure. And that would give us more efficient learning and more robust behavior and so on."

"So I'm still there, OK? So I'm still in I'm still trying to figure out how we can design an architecture that can learn efficiently. And so the research strategy that I have really adopted, I work closely with a colleague, Tomás Lozano-Pérez. Our strategy has been the following, which is to try to think of some very generic representation and inference mechanisms and build those in and then figure out how to learn the rest of the stuff. And we're all used to I think by now the idea of some representation that inference mechanisms that we would want to build in."

"For instance, everyone's used to the idea of convolution now in image space. But if you think about it. And I've had people tell me who work on convolutional neural networks that they don't build any structure into their system. It's just a neural network. But of course, as soon as you build the compositional structure into a neural network, you are taking a position on some regularities that are in the input signal and so on. And you're taking advantage of that so that you don't have to learn a whole fully connected network, but you just learn some compositional kernels."

"So just as convolution gives us a great leverage when you apply it to the right part of the problem, then the intuition as well, hopefully there there's a few mechanisms, hopefully not like 100 mechanisms, but maybe 10. And then if we figure out how to use those mechanisms to bias learning and to structure behavior that we could learn robust ways of behaving that are efficient and so on."

"So one set of possible kind of general ideas includes convolution in space also and time. Maybe understanding the kinematics of the system that it's connected together in joints and segments, a notion of planning to move through space, being able to do causal reasoning-- if I were to do this, what would happen? -- Abstracting over individual objects, various kinds of state and temporal abstraction and so on. So our view-- I don't want to commit to a particular list-- but is that there's a list of structural principles that are pretty generic and very broadly useful and we should build them in."

"OK, I'll keep going. I'll surely be able to offend some people soon. And I'll work harder at that. OK. so if we kind of accept this idea that we're going to build in some structure, then what? And the thing that my colleague and I have done recently. Well, now, maybe not super recently, but recent. In order to test out the idea that there's a set of mechanisms that would work well, what we did is we hand built the rest of the system. So we hand-built some transition models, inference rules, ways of doing search control and so on and connected them up to these general mechanisms and made a system."

"And just again, to kind of give you the motivation. I really want a robot. This isn't my kitchen, by the way, just in case you were worried, my kitchen. But imagine that you had to clean this kitchen or make breakfast in it or something. It would be very hard. And imagine programming a robot to do it. It's extremely hard. And so one thing that's useful to do is to think about what makes this problem hard. So one of the things that makes it hard is that there are lots of objects."

"So the dimensionality of the space is kind of unthinkably high. It's also not exactly clear what constitutes an object here. If you were going to behave in this world, it would be a very long sequence of primitive actions that you would take in order to clean this kitchen. And also there's just a fundamental amount of uncertainty in this problem, right? So you don't know what's in the blue bowl or what will happen if you try to pull out a certain thing. You don't know when the people are coming home or what they want for dinner all sorts of stuff you don't know."

"And so any approach that works effectively in a domain like this is going to have to handle very large spaces, very long horizons, and really lots of uncertainty. So we have kind of a standard structural decomposition to this problem. We call this belief space hierarchical planning in the now. I'll decode what that means a little bit."

"Fundamentally, the way we think about it is that we decompose the computation that's in the robot's head now into two parts. The first part is in charge of taking the sequence, the history of actions and observations, and trying to synthesize them into some representation of a belief for a probability distribution about the way the world might be and then another module that takes that belief and decides how to behave."

"A poll will give you the most popular answer but not the answer that optimizes the preference of a group."

"You have the sense of touch because you need it."

"We take the sense of touch for granted. Think about it: Without it, you're missing one of the basic senses that enables you to interact with the world."

"The reason that fish form schools, birds form flocks, and bees form swarms is that they are smarter together than they would be apart. They don't take a vote; they don't take a poll: they form a system. They are all interactive and make a decision together in real time."

"How does nature amplify the intelligence of groups? It forms swarms."

"Forcing polarized groups into a swarm allows them to find the answer that most people are satisfied with"

"Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school"

"Taking a vote or poll is a great simple way to take a decision, but it doesn't help a group find consensus. It actually polarizes people and highlights the differences between them. People end up getting entrenched in their views."

"We focus on a unique form of artificial intelligence called artificial swarm intelligence"

"Siri is your humble intelligent personal assistant that goes everywhere with you and can do things for you, just by you asking."

"... I would give every single person in the department an entire month anything they wanted. For a month. It’s kind of insane because you’re talking thousands of people for a month, millions of dollars of salary spent for a month for people to do whatever they wanted and they would work so hard that month coming up with incredible ideas. In fact, one I saw was this idea of a 10-foot user interface, and we turned it into the Apple TV. Apple TV was invented because someone was encouraged to do whatever they wanted for a month. You can have that kind of environment to support creativity."

"... That guy was talking about how Microsoft had solved ... tablet computer and they're gonna do it with pens and he just, like, shoved it in Steve's face the way that they were going to, like, rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. Steve ... show them how it's really done ... At that time, touch screen was resistive touch ... He said, "we need to do capacitive-touch and has to be multi-touch." The moment you saw that, you knew this was the way to go."

"Nitrogen (N) enrichment is an element of that could influence the growth and abundance of many s. In this , I synthesized responses of microbial to N additions in 82 published field studies. I hypothesized that the biomass of , bacteria or the microbial community as a whole would be altered under N additions. I also predicted that changes in biomass would parallel changes in soil CO2 emissions. Microbial biomass declined 15% on average under , but fungi and bacteria were not significantly altered in studies that examined each group separately. Moreover, declines in abundance of microbes and fungi were more evident in studies of longer durations and with higher total amounts of N added. In addition, responses of microbial biomass to N fertilization were significantly correlated with responses of soil CO2 emissions. There were no significant effects of biomes, fertilizer types, ambient N deposition rates or methods of measuring biomass. Altogether, these results suggest that N enrichment could reduce microbial biomass in many ecosystems, with corresponding declines in soil CO2 emissions."

"In this commentary, I advocate for more detailed incorporation of in , to improve our projections of . Current Earth system models display relatively low predictability of stocks, which limit our ability to estimate future climate conditions. A more explicit incorporation of microbial mechanisms can increase the accuracy of ecosystem-scale models that inform the larger-scale Earth system models. Of the numerous microbial groups that can influence soil C dynamics, AM fungi are particularly tractable for integration in models. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are globally abundant and perform critical roles in , such as augmentation of net and soil C storage. Moreover, AM communities exhibit relatively low diversity within ecosystems, compared to other microbial groups. In addition, global datasets of AM ecology are available for use in model development. Thus, AM communities can be readily simulated in next-generation trait-based models that link microbial diversity to ecosystem function. Altogether, we are well-poised to incorporate the dynamics of individual AM taxa in ecosystem models, which can then be coupled to Earth system models. Hopefully, these efforts would advance our ability to predict and plan for future climate change."

"When trees build wood, is incorporated. It takes a long time to decompose ... It’s a smaller scale in . Some of the material they make can be almost woody. The is tough to decompose. The cell walls stay in the soil, microscopically. ... It adds up to a lot ... twice as much carbon in the soil as in the , and much of that is in [fungi]."

"I asked whether —applies to microbes. I conducted a synthesis of empirical studies that tested relationships among microbial traits presumed to define the competitive, stress tolerance and ruderal, and other ecological strategies. There was broad support for Grime's triangle. However, the ecological strategies were inconsistently linked to shifts in under environmental changes like nitrogen and phosphorus addition, warming, , etc. We may be missing important ecological strategies that more closely influence microbial community composition under shifting environmental conditions. We may need to start by documenting changes in microbial communities in response to environmental conditions at fine spatiotemporal scales relevant for microbes. We can then develop empirically based ecological strategies, rather than modifying those based on . Synthesis. Microbes appear to sort into similar ecological strategies as plants. However, these microbial ecological strategies do not consistently predict how community composition will shift under environmental change. By starting ‘from the ground up’, we may be able to delineate ecological strategies more relevant for microbes."