University of California, Los Angeles alumni

"There's a deep thirst and hunger to know more about space, literally because of the Star Trek phenomenon."

"We want to find [life]. Absolutely. And even now it's really disappointing when you think that, if there is extraterrestrial life, it’s probably bacteria and microbial life. Because you want Star Wars. I want to meet Spock. I think that, as intellectual beings, we fantasize about meeting other intellects similar to our own. It's just a basic human desire."

"…you go home and maybe on the evening news you see something that reminds you that you're exploring space. Something that reminds me that I am one of a four-hundred member squad that is flying a spacecraft, exploring the solar system. Every once in a while you step back and you see that this is really amazing."

"I love working in the space program on one-of-a-kind engineering applications, like flying spacecraft, which is really a team effort. There are so many aspects of keeping a piece of engineering working and operating when it's thousands of kilometers away from you. The ingenuity required is amazing."

"To be an effective leader you have to be a good listener -- listening even to those who disagree with you -- and a good communicator; you have to be persuasive."

"We were violating the law, lobbying from the executive branch."

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

"I have not been convicted of anything."

"Brain drugs may make us feel better, but they do not solve the problems that led us to feel miserable"

"We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives."

"Beware of getting involved with people who seem to be able to feel good but have no close friends. They may be witty and fun to be around, but their humor is all put-downs and hostility. If you marry such a person, you will soon be the recipient of that hostile humor and may regret it for the rest of your marriage....Someone who does not have good friends does not know how to love."

"[Reality Therapy] is based on choice theory and focuses on improving present relationships, almost always disregards past relationships, and depends for its success on creating a good relationship between the client and the counselor."

"When a client says, It's hard to say, he usually knows what's really going on but doesn't want to talk about it....I break through that reluctance by acting as if it wasn't there. 'Well, say it anyway. This is the place to say hard-to-say-things."

"When we depress, we believe we are the victims of a feeling over which we have no control."

"To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it. This use of nouns and adjectives makes it logical for us to believe that we can do nothing for ourselves...but you are capable of choosing something better. If it is a choice, it follows that you are responsible for making it. With verbs, you are not a victim of mental illness; you are either the beneficiary of your own good choices or the victim of your own bad choices. You are not ill in the usual sense of having the flu or food poisoning. A choice theory world is a tough responsible world; you cannot use grammar to escape responsibility for what you are doing."

"Such people who choose to depress are not mentally ill; their brain chemistry is not abnormal. It is changed from what it is when they are happy, but that change is perfectly normal for the total behavior, depressing, they are choosing....The brain chemistry no more causes his depressing than sweating causes running. It is the choice to depress or to run that results in both."

"We would be much better off getting rid of the psychology that is causing so much misery than looking for chemicals that make us feel better but do nothing to solve our loneliness."

"Drugs provide pleasure; they cannot provide happiness. For happiness, you need people."

"If you depend on the widespread lover's delusion, 'With my love he or she will change,' you have little chance to help yourself. This delusion is external control to the maximum. If things are not good from the beginning, they are very likely to change, but not for the better."

"What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now: improve an important, present relationship."

"Your teen may be weaker, but he is not without the ability to do himself and others a lot of harm by showing you that you can't control him at school or anywhere else when he is out of your sight....[W]hen he is on his own, your only control over him is the strength of your relationship."

"The Seven Deadly Habits of External Control: Blaming, Criticizing, Complaining, Nagging, Threatening, Punishing, and Bribing (Rewarding to Control)."

"The most destructive habit [to relationships] is criticizing; next comes blaming, but any of the habits are more than capable of disconnecting you from a person you want to be close with."

"Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind."

"If I cannot offer some relief to our world, if I cannot inspire our generation to join me, then I feel I am a complete waste of space. This constant fear of feeling irrelevant in our society has been the catalyst behind all my efforts and passions for as long as I can remember."

"Acting is not a lofty performance; it is simply the source of becoming and existing transparently. Acting, I find, is the art of frothing to the surface every raw and honest emotion. The moment an actor pretends, he loses his audience forever"

"When pursued with a pure heart, acting is an entirely selfless profession."

"Our nature as sensitive beings is far too complex to break apart, re-examine and reshape in a poem."

"So we remain, forever more, Immortal and Found."

"Every one of us strives to be a better person; and if I am to contribute one thing of myself, it would be compassion."

"It is the show that keeps giving. Every night it offers something to society, and it offered something to every one of us. It brought us all together for a lifetime.""

"I feel it is our inherent duty as a humane society, above any intangible responsibility, to invest in our world's children’s potential, passion and confidence."

"My children's books are written on the belief that every child has a talent and a passion. Each story unfolds into an adventure of nurturing that confidence until a passion blooms."

"My mother's only wish was to start a life in America because America was the cradle of every promise and opportunity."

"There’s a condensed softness about the Albanian people, and I’ve witnessed examples of their hospitality. Albanian blood runs through my veins and I am proud to call myself Albanian."

"I was an unassuming, skinny little girl."

"Although I was quiet as a child, I had this resistless passion inside of me–this need and hunger to create my own world. Poetry filled that void, and its words fed that vital necessity of ownership."

"It came about like a typical audition where the actress doesn’t know a soul in the room, and exposes her heart and vulnerability in hopes of winning a handful of strangers’ affection."

"I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I’m not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for attention is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress."

"All three elements of storytelling carry one vital philosophy– to offer universal insight, and many instances, hope and therapy to those who absolutely need it. To illuminate a combined and universal purpose, whether it be through the written word, the spoken word, or both elements incorporated into another element of truth. All exist to tell a story to the world."

"I would like to see from women in this industry what I have had the privilege of witnessing for a decade now. Strength, conviction, and unapologetic sensitivity for the healing of souls."

"While some mothers sing lullabies to their children, my mother read me poetry. And to this day, I associate my strongest and most insistent feelings with words lyrically organized on a page."

"I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration."

"In the end we're all searching for our home, that one place where we belong."

"The soul that rides deep through our veins, Our red rivers, and smiles. This darling soul, as endearing As dead poets and countries. This restless soul that neighbors our hearts. A perfect torch that guides our flames To immortality."

"Charity befriends the children— From us, through us, in us. Behind this door, Charity waits. Alone. Tolerant. With a smile as deep as your core."

"If I could I would kiss his wrists. If I had half the courage to face his pain."

"You have marked your loyal entrance through water and sky, I cannot quite reach you, but by me you lie."

"Sing your song, unforgiving siren, Part the curtain clouds with your faithful entrance, And clear your voice. Pour your song of milk onto this land of yours."

"Masiela was a soft-spoken, gentle, and ethereal little girl with absolutely no tincture of rebellion in her make-up."

"In our most Puritan of society, gambling-like other pleasures-is either taxed, restricted to certain hours, or forbidden altogether. Yet the impulse to gamble remains an eternal aspect of the irrationality of man. It finds outlets in business, war, politics, in the formal overtures of the gambling casinos, and in the less ceremonious exchanges among individuals of differing opinions."

"Shortly after pithecanthropus erectus gained the ascendancy, he turned his attention to the higher-order abstractions."

""Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo" is a euphemism for closing a single gaming table. It was last accomplished at the Casino Ste. des Bains de Mer during the final days of 1957, with a harvest of 180 million francs."

"In general statistics can be considered as the offspring of the theory of probability, it builds on its parent and extends the area of patronymic jurisdiction."

"A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution."

"The essence of the phenomenon of gambling is decision making. The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action, or strategy, from among the set of admissible strategies."

"There are no conventional games involving conditions of uncertainty without risk."

"The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766-1845) formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result."

"Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system."

"Coin matching and finger flashing were among the first formal games to arise in the history of gambling. The class of Morra games extends back to the pre-Christian era, although not until comparatively recent times have game-theoretic solutions been derived."

"Against human opposition the machine usually emerges victorious, since individual patterns tend to be not random but a function of emotions and previous training and experience."

"While no rigorous proof of an optimal strategy has been achieved, Robbins has proposed the principal of "staying on a winner" and has shown it to be uniformly better than a strategy of random selection."

"The hope of a positive expected gain lies in detecting a wheel with sufficient bias."

"The first-known public lottery was sponsored by Augustus Caesar to raise funds for repairing the city of Rome; the first public lottery awarding money prizes, the Lotto de Firenze, was established in Florence in 1530."

"One of the oldest mythological fables tells of Mercury playing at dice with Selene and winning from her the five days of the epact (thus totaling the 365 days of the year and harmonizing the lunar and solar calendars)."

"Although the major gambling casinos do not maintain statistical records on the results of games of Craps, one event has been recorded-that wherein a young man achieved 28 consecutive "passes" at the Desert Inn Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada (June 10, 1950). Odds against such an event are 400 million to 1."

"In 1423, the Franciscan friar St. Bernardino of Siena preached a celebrated sermon against cards (Contra Alcarum Ludos) at Bologna, attributing their invention to the devil. Despite such ecclesiastic interdiction, Johannes Gutenberg printed playing cards the same year as his famous Bible (1440). The cards from Gutenberg's press were Tarot cards, from which the modern deck is derived."

"Blackjack does possess a memory (the interdependence of the cards) and a conscience (inferior play will inevitably be penalized) and is not democratic (the mental agility and retentiveness of the player are significant factors)."

"Because the fluctuations in the composition of the deck as it is dependent over successive (and dependent) trials, it is intuitively apparent that altering decisions or the magnitude of the wager or both in accordance with the fluctuations should prove advantageous to the player."

"Contract Bridge is likely the most challenging card game extant; it is certainly the the most obsessive for its ranks of zealous followers. The initial progenitor of all Bridge forms is the game of Triumph, which gained currency about A.D. 1500. In the mid seventeenth century, Triumph evolved into Whist, a partnership game for four players. The change from Whist to Bridge occurred about 1886with a publication in London of a small pamphlet, titled Biritch or Russian Whist."

"The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad."

"Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game."

"Reflecting an amalgam of economics, monetary, and psychological factors, the stock market represents possibly the most subtly intricate game invented by man."

"A weakness of the random-walk model lies in its assumption of instantaneous adjustment, whereas the information impelling a stock market toward its "intrinsic value" gradually becomes disseminated throughout the market place."

"From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true."

"Anthropologists have often commented on the striking resemblance between the uneducated gambler and the primitive."

"The assumption that individuals act objectively in accordance with purely mathematical dictates to maximize their gain or utility cannot be sustained by empirical observation."

"What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit - and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization - is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts."

"Humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans."

"We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure and incentives that they usefully predict outcomes. When the world we are trying to explain and improve, however, is not well described by a simple model, we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it."

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2009 to Elinor Ostrom... "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons" and Oliver E. Williamson... "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm"."

"Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes."

"Ostrom cautioned against single governmental units at global level to solve the collective action problem of coordinating work against environmental destruction. Partly, this is due to their complexity, and partly to the diversity of actors involved. Her proposal was that of a polycentric approach, where key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible."

"Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings."

"The universe is not fine-tuned to us; we are fine-tuned to our particular universe."

"The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics."

"The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something for which you have no evidence."

"Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense."

"The existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creator hypothesis, then the prediction is not confirmed."

"Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for "a very big number.”"

"The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically."

"We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that requires a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the event...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God."

"[T]he most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour."

"The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent. As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, "The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable." [...] In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention--not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God."

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

"What makes the Nightmares on Elm Street universal and forever in their attraction, I think, is simply the dream. The landscape of the mind, the subconscious, the nightmare. Everybody has a nightmare, and everybody apparently has falling dreams, and everybody has the drowning dream, and everybody has certain kinds of sexual manifestation dreams, as well as our stress dreams; I didn’t study for the algebra test, I didn’t study for my driving test, you know, all those dreams. I still have those dreams, and it’s just such an interesting thing that our mind can turn against us, our own mind, you know we all have."

"Robert Englund is incredibly intelligent, very clever, and he is a fireball of energy. For that man to be sitting in a chair to have four hours of makeup put on him….God bless him, haha! He knows anything about history, tile, grout, decorating, authors, film, he is just an abundant person, and just so fun. He’s also incredibly caring as an actor. When we’re on set and being blocked, there’s no favoritism or anything, he wants the scene to be as good as possible."

"I've always been a fan of the [Rocky] films, even the fifth, that I know some people didn't care for, I've always enjoyed them. I thought they were great. It really just got into the underdog story and how if you have your mind in the right direction, and your heart is full of the right kind of stuff, you'll succeed and you'll triumph over adversity, over really anything."

"I was a vegetarian in the womb, I was doing it before it was a trend. My parents have been vegetarian for 40 years. They raised my sisters and I vegetarian, we had a dog — he was vegetarian."

"Gibbs is thankful to be alive. He really thought life was over, and for him to admit that is huge, because he’s not that kind of guy. After all this time, the writers still find new places to take him. NCIS was never a show about the crime cases, because sometimes we solve ’em, sometimes we don’t. This is a show about characters. The audience takes real ownership of the people we play."

"I was never interested in playing him with a big red S on his chest. I’m much more attracted to the underbelly stuff. Gibbs is a loner, with emotional scars a mile deep that run in a million different directions. At work, he’s a leader. But who is he if you take away his job? I play him, and even I don’t know the answer to that."

"Change is healthy. Any actor can depart this show and it will survive. In my mind, there is nothing unclear about how I got here. You go to different shows and hear the chirping about who’s No. 1 on the call sheet or who has the biggest trailer. For me, it’s about doing a job as well as you can. If your job is to get somebody coffee—and I did that in my early days—then make it the best cup of coffee possible. Do the work. And do it with pride."

"My parents kept things real. I had no idea they were famous. In fact, it didn’t hit me until one day when I was riding in the car with my father in Ann Arbor, Michigan—I was maybe 8 and could barely see above the dashboard—and we stopped at a crosswalk. Suddenly we were surrounded by people who recognized my dad and were really thrilled to see him. I remember looking at this man I thought I knew so well and thinking, “Who are you?”"

"They used their intelligence to control things around them, instead of letting nature and the strong-muscled have their way."

"Finally, in one fateful trillionth of a second, a nuclear compound was formed that had two very important properties: it was stable, and it could make a copy of itself. Life had come to the crust of the neutron star."

"An animal doesn’t need to develop curiosity and intelligence if it has no problems that need solving."

"After a short flurry of national and international concern over the “death of the Sun,” the human race settled down to solving the insoluble problem in the best way that they knew—they ignored it and hoped it would go away."

"No data is preferable to poor data."

"Do you realize that when I get back from this trip two years from now I am going to be getting more in royalties from children’s books than I will in salary for being a space scientist?"

"She normally did not pay very much attention to religion, but, as Leader of the Clan, she was automatically Chief Worshiper of Bright at holy times, and it wouldn’t do to let things be disrupted by an obviously deranged individual."

"His eye-stubs reached out toward the Eyes in an attempt to copulate with the stars."

"The Leader of the Combined Clans, although nominally a devout worshiper of the God Bright, was willing to compartmentalize her mind and look at the pictures without being bothered by the religious overtones."

"If the computer had been a human, its eyebrows would have raised."

"They are signaling to us with the neutron star equivalent of America Indian smoke signals!"

"You are lucky. Very few theoretical scientists ever see their mathematical equations turned into working hardware in their lifetime."

"“Inertia propulsion!” Pierre exclaimed. “On our last shift we were teaching them Newton’s law of gravity. Today they have inertia drives! Where will they be tomorrow?” “They probably will be able to control space and time and won’t have to bother with such clumsy things as black hole gravity generators and inertia drives,” Amalita replied."

"Is our universe fundamentally a mess, or is there some simple and natural structure that all this could emerge from, or be parts of? One approach to answering these questions is String Theory (or, more generally, M-Theory), but string unification models have grown excessively in complexity while producing zero predictive progress. After several decades of extensive theoretical exploration leading nowhere, it is time to consider that the string program may have been a wrong turn. If we backtrack, imagining String Theory never happened, we can go in a new direction, building on the success of Grand Unified Theories and recent progress in Loop Quantum Gravity. The structures of GUTs and LQG rely heavily on Lie groups and are remarkably compatible. By considering the known Lie groups and fields of physics as parts of a larger geometric whole, we move towards Lie group unification."

"I think that, without experimental checks, physics can — and has — gone off the rails ... experiment has to be the ultimate decider of what is good physics."

"For almost a decade, Lisi moved on no fixed schedule between Maui, where he likes to surf, and the mountains of the West, where he snowboards. Four years ago, Lisi persuaded his girlfriend, Crystal Baranyk, who is an artist, to move with him into an old Colorado ski-shuttle van; he remodelled it himself, shipped it to Maui, and parked it by the beach. They lived in the van for a year, with no toilet. He worked intermittently, sometimes as a snowboard instructor, once on a short-term consulting contract when a friend’s software company needed an algorithm solved, but mostly he tried to think about physics."

"Back then, he admits, his theory still had some shortcomings; for example the three generations of fermions didn't quite come out right. But this was in 2007. In the years since, Garrett has solved some of the remaining puzzles. Still, his masterpiece is unfinished, not yet to his full satisfaction."

"When you’re a voice actor, it’s not about you, it’s about the character. If there’s a history of that character, you want to be as true to that as you possibly can be without voice matching. Just keep the spirit alive and have it come out in your own voice. I know that’s what I did."

"New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said that the Intel competition "identifies and honors the top math and science students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems.""

"The contest doesn't rank talent in the same way we identify the fastest hurdlers or longest jumpers."

"most top science and math students don't participate in such national contests."

"Project-oriented contests such as Intel aren't measures of scientific brilliance"

"A past winner ... told the STEM education newsletter Metroplex Math Circle about choosing among projects offered by her university mentor"

"Professor Miriam Rafailovich... told me ...that the contestants "get massive coaching from the schools"

"There is even a how-to book, "Success With Science: The Winners' Guide to High School Research,""

"many contestants have immigrant parents"

"In case after case, we see tech titans and entrepreneurs misbehaving or breaking the law. They push the boundary of acceptable or ethical behavior that most of us have to play by. Even if some of them provide the technologies of tomorrow, it doesn’t mean they can operate under different set of rule"

"Three of the president’s proposals target tech. This is especially true in that the foreign workers are overwhelmingly young, thus exacerbating the rampant age discrimination that we already have in the tech world"

"The H-1B program authorizes non-immigrant visas under which skilled foreign workers may be employed in the U.S., typically in computer-related positions. Congress greatly expanded the program in 1998 and then again in 2000, in response to heavy pressure from industry, which claimed a desperate software labor shortage. After presenting an overview of the H-1B program in Parts II and III, the Article will show in Part IV that these shortage claims are not supported by the data. Part V will then show that the industry's motivation for hiring H-lBs is primarily a desire for cheap, compliant labor. The Article then discusses the adverse impacts of the H-1B program on various segments of the American computer-related labor force in Part VI, and presents proposals for reforms in Part VII."

"The main issue when it comes to hiring someone from Asia is the language barrier. It's difficult to book someone when they don't speak the language and they can't deliver the lines or even speak to the director. But in terms of Asian-American actresses, we all speak it fluently!"

"Here's what I love about social media: You get to peer into people's lives that you normally wouldn't be able to."

"My mom suggested studying acting in college, but I was a bit scared to choose that path because I couldn't wrap my head around the drama school audition process."

"I believe film and television should reflect our society, and the reality is that there are people in many different shapes and sizes, ethnicities, sexual orientation - the list goes on."

"It was really fun! It’s definitely difficult when you can’t say what you want to say, [but] she [Kimiko] says a lot without uttering a word. Portraying that has been a challenge but I really don’t know how to explain it; it just comes to me and I kind of become that."

"Even if we didn’t have our current political climate, I think it would be very satisfying to beat up a Nazi. I think when that happened, it was really—it’s satisfying to see onscreen. I was watching it with my boyfriend yesterday and he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s so good. It’s so satisfying, I’ve been wanting this all season.’ But obviously, me as Kimiko, I’ve always wanted to do that."

"But looking back on it, maybe that was just me being this Asian actor who’s used to not being given a story of her own. A lot of times, you’re right, the trope of silent Asian characters is very much a thing. And so I guess a part of me didn’t want to ask for too much, or I didn’t even think about asking for more because she was already given so much. But perhaps that it is the conditioning—that I have been conditioned to think in that way, if you get my drift."

"I grew up in a unique environment where I was immersed in both Japanese and American cultures equally."

"Upon graduation, I hit a wall. All of my good friends from UCLA were taking on jobs they were passionate about, and I felt left behind. It took a bit of soul searching, but in the end, I finally had the guts to pursue acting."

"I don't come from a well-off family. We're very middle-class, lower-middle-class, so that's something I cherish."

"Several classes of antimicrobial agents (e.g., penicillins, cephalosporins, tetracyclines, chloramphenicol, and clindamycin) are useful in treatment of infections due to anaerobic bacteria. However, certain anaerobic bacteria have shown a striking resistance to antimicrobial agents. In vitro susceptibility tests are useful for selection of optimal therapy. The choice of agent depends, to some extent, on the organisms responsible for the infection. Bacteroides fragilis is the most commonly encountered anaerobe, and it is also the most resistant to antimicrobial agents. Other factors influencing the selection of therapy include pharmacologic characteristics, degree of bactericidal activity, and toxicity. Proper therapy for anaerobic infections often requires intensive antimicrobial therapy for a prolonged period. Surgical intervention, including drainage of abscesses and excision of necrotic tissue, is important."

"The bacteria typically described from biliary tract infection include Escherichia coli, Klebsiella, Enterobacter, and enterococci. It has also been recognized for some time that Clostridium perfringens may occasionally be involved in serious complications of biliary tract infection such as sepsis and emphysematous cholecystitis. Other anaerobes, including various Bacteroides and Fusobacterium sp, clostridia other than C perfringens, anaerobic cocci and streptococci, and Actinomyces have been reported from a variety of biliary tract infections, usually as single case reports ... More recently, several reports indicate that anaerobes, and especially B fragilis, may be more common in biliary tract infections than had been appreciated ... Anaerobes have been recovered in approximately 40% of such infections; B fragilis is the most common anaerobe encountered. Anaerobes may also be found, as aerobes are, in asymptomatic bactibilia."

"Anaerobic bacteria produce many different enzymes that are of importance in providing nutrients to the bacterial cell, as virulence factors, and in permitting organisms to colonize or survive under adverse conditions (including exposure to antimicrobial agents). Some enzymes effect several types of modifications to bile acids, neutral steroids, and corticosteroids. Anaerobes are clearly important in a variety of infections in humans and animals as well as in various other types of pathologic processes."

"There is an impressive incidence of anaerobes in major infections involving the lung and pleural space, intra-abdominal sites, and the female genital tract. Almost all anaerobic infections are endogenous in origin. Therapy consists of making the environment such that anaerobes find it difficult to proliferate, checking the spread of anaerobes into healthy tissues, and neutralizing the toxins of anaerobes."

"Anaerobes are prevalent on all mucosal surfaces and virtually all anaerobic infections are endogenous. Two thirds of anaerobic infections involve five anaerobic organisms or groups—the Bacteroides fragilis group, the Bacteroides melaninogenicus-Bacteroides asaccharolyticus group, Fusobacterium nucleatum, the anaerobic cocci, and Clostridium perfringens. Conditions that lower the oxidation-reduction potential and disrupt the mucosal surface (eg, vascular problems, malignant neoplasms, and surgery) lead to infection with anaerobes. Clues to anaerobic infection include foul odor, gas, tissue destruction, underlying malignant neoplasms, and the unique appearance of certain anaerobes on Gram's stain. Specimens must be collected to avoid normal flora and transported to the laboratory under anaerobic conditions. Therapy involves surgical débridement and drainage and the use of various antimicrobial agents. Antimicrobial agents must be used for extended periods to avoid relapse."

"The field of infectious diseases covers many entities that can be considered true medical emergencies. Included are meningitis, brain abscess, spinal epidural abscess, epiglottitis, pneumonia, bacteremia, endocarditis, certain intraabdominal infections, gas gangrene, and necrotizing fasciitis. Because emergencies related to infectious agents are potentially the most readily reversible of all medical emergencies, it behooves us to diagnose them as rapidly and specifically as possible so that appropriate life-saving therapy may be begun expeditiously."

"The commonly used drugs that have a major effect on the colonic flora are ampicillin, cefoperazone, clindamycin and oral neomycin or kanamycin, used together with either tetracycline, erythromycin or metronidazole."

"Most gastrointestinal infections secondary to the use of antimicrobial agents that have been documented are related to overgrowth of Clostridium difficile which produces a spectrum from severe pseudomembranous colitis to mild diarrhea or asymptomatic carriage. The most common inducers of pseudomembranous colitis or antimicrobial agent-associated diarrhea are ampicillin, clindamycin, and various cephalosporins, but almost all antimicrobials may cause this problem. Symptoms vary from watery to bloody diarrhea; the extent and severity of the diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps and the incidence of complications (such as toxic megacolon and perforation of the bowel) and of fatality are variable. Normal carriage of C. difficile in infants and asymptomatic carriage in adults who have received antimicrobial therapy make it impossible to rely on culture for diagnosis. The presence of cytotoxin or enterotoxin produced by C. difficile is much more reliable diagnostically, but there may be false-positives with this as well, particularly in infants."

"Anaerobic bacteria currently demonstrate increased resistance to antimicrobial agents, primarily by the production of beta-lactamase. A number of species of Bacteroides, most notably those in the Bacteroides fragilis group, produce these enzymes. A few species of Fusobacterium and Clostridium produce beta-lactamase as well. Fortunately, this mechanism of resistance is readily overcome by administering beta-lactamase inhibitors coupled with a beta-lactam antibiotic that would otherwise be inactivated. Other types of resistance encountered in anaerobic bacteria include inactivating enzymes such as chloramphenicol acetyltransferase, plasmid-mediated transferable multiple-drug resistance, changes in porin molecules in the outer membrane of the bacterial cell, decreased uptake of drug by other mechanisms, changes in the target organs such as penicillin-binding proteins, and decreased reduction of the antibiotic to an active intermediate product. In many institutions, certain drugs such as cefoxitin, clindamycin, and piperacillin, which were previously active against almost all strains of B. fragilis, are now effective against only 70 to 85% of this group of anaerobes."

"Much of the available data on the incidence of anaerobic infections is not reliable. Bacteriologic data without clinical correlation are not adequate, since the organisms are not necessarily significant. Similarly, clinical data with fragmentary bacteriological information are not ideal. In both types of papers, one often finds data on specimens cultured for anaerobes that clearly must have been contaminated with normal flora (for example, coughed sputum and voided urine). The exact specimen type and source is not always indicated or recognizable."

"Anaerobic or mixed anaerobic-aerobic pulmonary infection is important both in community-acquired disease and in the hospital setting. Its principal causes are aspiration of oral or gastic contents and of organisms involved in periodontal disease. Indeed, pneumonia following aspiration is undoubtedly the most common type of hospital-acquired pneumonia and as such is a major cause of death and disability in hospitalized patients. Both endogenous oral flora (primarily anaerobes and viridans streptococci) and hospital-acquired oral or gastric flora (such as Staphylococcus aureus, various members of the Enterobacteriaceae family, and Pseudomonas) may be involved in the infections. The principal complications are tissue destruction (necrotizing pneumonia), abscess formation, and thoracic empyema."

"... (1) What is the clinical relevance of anaerobic bacteriology? (2) How can the microbiologist, with limited and decreasing resources, perform reliable, detailed studies of anaerobic bacteriology? (3) When and how should susceptibility testing be done with anaerobes? If the clinician knows the usual bacteriology of various types of infection and how this may be modified by pathophysiologic processes in the host or by prior therapy, he/she can use a logical empiric approach to treatment of the patient. As to the microbiologist's dilemma, it is not realistic or rational for a microbiologist in a nonteaching hospital to do detailed bacteriologic studies and routine anaerobic susceptibility testing. The resources available should be committed primarily to the patient who is seriously ill. Such allocation of resources, of course, requires repeated and effective communication between microbiologist and clinician."

"It has been a hundred years since the role of anaerobic bacteria and, especially, non-spore-forming anaerobes in infections began to be appreciated."

"The most clinically important anaerobes are the five genera of Gram-negative rods. Bacteroides, especially the B. fragilis group (made of up ten species, one of which is the species B. fragilis), is particularly important. The other Gram-negative genera are Prevotella, Porphyromonas, Fusobacterium, and Bilophila. Among the Gram-positive anaerobes, there are cocci (primarily Peptostreptococcus) and sporeforming (Clostridium) and non-sporeforming bacilli (especially Actinomyces and Propionibacterium)."

"... a recent study of ours employing the powerful pyrosequencing technique on stools of subjects with regressive autism showed that Desulfovibrio was more common in autistic subjects than in controls. We subsequently confirmed this with pilot cultural and real-time PCR studies and found siblings of autistic children had counts of Desulfovibrio that were intermediate, suggesting possible spread of the organism in the family environment. Desulfovibrio is an anaerobic bacillus that does not produce spores but is nevertheless resistant to aerobic and other adverse conditions by other mechanisms and is commonly resistant to certain antimicrobial agents (such as cephalosporins) often used to treat ear and other infections that are relatively common in childhood. This bacterium also produces important virulence factors and its physiology and metabolism position it uniquely to account for much of the pathophysiology seen in autism."

"The crypto bros are spending tens of millions in Washington to make sure this industry is regulated as lightly as possible, ... There are no lobbyists or PACs dedicated to preventing tax evasion, sanctions evasion, and the other forms of illicit finance that cryptocurrency enables,"

"I would like to thank Bangladesh for providing shelters to thousands of Rohingyas. I want to reiterate that if Myanmar government is reluctant to establish good governance to save its Rohingya community, if they do not want to provide security to the Rohingya people living at the northern parts of Rakhine state or unable to do so then the Rohingya majority area of the State should incorporate with Bangladesh. And US should support to annex Rakhine to Bangladesh that is also a demand for the people of the area. Rohingyas want to stay with such a government who will work cordially to save them instead of killing."

"In my experience and that of my colleagues, public interest in climate change has actually increased over the past few years - We’re witnessing the effects of climate change with far more frequency than we used to due to increased storms, flooding, and generally wacky weather."

"Far from it! The sooner we tackle climate change, the less extreme the measures need to be to solve it. In fact, most of the things we need to do to solve climate change are things we would want to do anyway for health, economic and social reasons. There are a lot of great reasons to move to a transport system that’s dominated by cycling and public transport options over traffic-inducing, isolating and dirty cars."

"If we let climate change continue unabated, it will affect the most vulnerable first."

"I'm kind of approaching my carbon footprint like I approach my weight, going to the gym regularly, watching what I eat, and realizing I'm not going to lose that 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) all at once, like I want."

"We can be pushing all these individual change things on people, but unless the government steps up, we won't be able to reach the target."

"So maybe the one biggest thing you can do is to get politically engaged, because behavioral change is really slow. Too slow to stop runaway climate change."

"What if instead of drowning in your self- hating thoughts, you spread them apart like cotton candy..."

"Lesson 1: You are a part of the universe, the universe is a part of you"

"How can we possibly feel oneness with the universe, if we aren't creating any inner space to really listen to what the universe is trying to tell us?"

"Let us get reacquainted with the miracle that is your breath: all the trees, flowers, and plants on this earth make it possible for you to breathe. All living things on this earth are breathing in and breathing out the same air that you are."

"There are no divisions in the universe, the universe is oneness, the universe just is"

"when we realize and truly embrace everything the is within us...that is when we can truly feel healed and whole again"

"we exist because of all the other living creatures the came before us"

"there are no separate waves in this ocean of energy"

"I think it’s this intention to pay attention to what you’re doing in your day-to-day life to take care of your home and body and health and really taking — not taking pride, but like how Marie Kondo says to thank your clothes when you’re giving them away, that spirit. I just like the idea of honoring these very mundane activities, whether it’s washing your dishes or decorating your office; because I think when you put care and intention into these activities, it infuses everything you do with this mindful sense of care, where things just feel more meaningful because you’re doing them for yourself. (2017)"

"When you feel like you have autonomy in everything in your life — what outfit you want to wear, or what flowers you want to buy for yourself, or what color area rug you want to put in your home — I feel like when you exercise making these choices for yourself, you just have more ownership of your life; and when you have more ownership of your life, you just make bolder choices for yourself that are going to improve the quality of your life in this really wonderful and intuitive way. I think when it comes down to it I want people to have joyful autonomy. (2017)"

"I feel like being a second-generation person of color born to immigrant parents, I really do think that sort of — however subconsciously — [does] play into my creative perspective on juggling dual realities, barriers in connecting with other people, just sort of having dual perspectives on reality. (2014)"

"A lot of people ask me — I get this all the time — 'Are you Buddhist? Are you Zen?' And my answer is always, 'I don't always necessarily identify myself with Buddhism, but the philosophy is something I'm always interested in and am very curious about learning more about.' So I am very influenced by Buddhist philosophies, Buddhist schools of thought. So much of it deals with being mindful, being fully aware of just a very subjective nature of reality, the illusion of reality, sort of the dichotomy of samsara or nirvana ... those are things that I do think about a lot, and I think it definitely, that interest reflects itself in the comics. (2014)"

"With comics, it’s always this interesting tug of war between what you can convey with words that can’t be conveyed with just image, and what you can convey with image that words can’t do justice to. So it’s always a combination of both when I come up with the stories because the two things are inseparable to me."

"That way of visualizing emotions, I feel like that came from that book I read that helped me meditate, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle...And one thing he emphasizes over and over, which is also something that’s explored a lot in Buddhist philosophy, is that your true essence is completely separate from your thought process. So whatever verbal chatter is in your mind, you can be immersed in it, or you can actually see it as a third-person observer and sort of step back from the chaos of your thoughts and just think to yourself, “Oh, that’s an interesting response I’m having,” or “Oh, how interesting that I’m going through that mental battle again. I’m triggered to think these thoughts again.” And it’s, of course, easier said than done, but I feel like making these comics is a way of reminding myself that if I’m feeling sad or if I’m feeling anxious, I’m not the sadness, I’m not the anxiousness. I can step back from this bad energy or see it as a rainstorm or a bad streak of weather that will eventually go away."

"I never want my stories to be just sad or just happy. I always feel like the stories that I love, they’re never completely resolved. All the loose ends aren’t tied, but it’s that tension that makes me keep thinking about it. One ending that keeps coming to mind is the ending for Spirited Away, the Ghibli movie, where it’s a happy ending but also a sad ending, but there’s also this possibility of more things to come. I just feel like that’s the most accurate representation of life. Even if it’s an ending, new things are on the way. Or even if it is a happy ending, it might pass one day. I feel like ultimately, with characters, I want them to go through a journey or go through some sort of transformation of epiphany. So it’s more a matter of that than whether it’s happy or sad."

"when making art, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum—you need at least one audience member, and that’s sort of an extension of life itself too. You need at least two people. The quote I always go back to—I think Tony Kushner said this in the introduction to Angels in America—is “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one.” That’s a quote that has always reverberated with me."

"My mother is British, from a family with a trade union background and a central interest in class struggle; she met my father, who is Nigerian, while both were students of mathematics in London. My father was a very talented mathematician, and after my parents married, he went on to a position in the mathematics department of the University of East Anglia."

"While I was growing up, the elementary school I attended was extremely ethnically homogeneous. I was unable to escape from heavy issues concerning race, which my mother always explained in a political context."

"My parents separated after my father resigned his university position to focus on his inventions, and my mother then finished her education and became a school mathematics teacher. We moved to a very cosmopolitan area of London, which was like a new birth to me; it was there that my interest in mathematics really began."

"I learned mathematics on my own from textbooks, which is perhaps strange given that both my parents were involved in the subject. At the same time, I spent a good deal of time studying art and wanted to follow a career in that direction until I was eventually convinced by my family that I should first work for a mathematics degree to ensure that I could earn a living."

"I went to Cambridge, which represented a second major change in my life. As I learned more mathematics, I saw that it is an entire world of its own which many people choose to live in, a world in many ways more real than the real world: it feels permanent, eternal, and offers a deep sense of security because nearly everyone who understands it agrees on what is truth. By the time I had finished at Cambridge, I was very involved with mathematics and did not consider other careers."

"My research is in the field of spectral geometry, the study of how the shape of an object affects the modes in which it can resonate. A famous question in the field is, Can one hear the shape of a drum? Spectral geometry bridges different branches of science, including engineering and physics, as well as a number of different fields of mathematics. However, quite different sorts of questions are studied within each discipline. I am a mathematical analyst, which gives me an appreciation for the infinite and the infinitesimal. At the moment, one of the things I am working on understanding is the total wavelength of a surface like a sphere or something of greater complexity, such as the surface of a bagel or a pretzel. What is this total wavelength? If you strike a surface it can resonate at any one of a list of frequencies, and the wavelength of the sound produced by the vibration is inversely proportional to the frequency. In the mathematically idealized model, there are infinitely many possible wavelengths. The total wavelength should be the sum of all of these individual wavelengths except that this infinite sum equals infinity. Fortunately, a finite number can be assigned to it by a slightly elusive process called regularization. (This process is also used in mathematical physics to mysteriously obtain true answers from formulas which do not really make sense!) I first became interested in the total wavelength as a model related to a question which can be roughly stated as, can one hear the shape of the universe? However, the total wavelength shows up in many quite different areas of mathematics and I am finding these connections intriguing."

"I am a mathematical analyst, and most of my research is in the area of spectral geometry. Problems in spectral geometry are also studied by various kinds of geometers, number theorists, applied mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and others. What is Spectral geometry? Spectral geometry most usually means the study of how the geometry of an object is related to the natural frequencies of the object. These are the frequencies at which the object can vibrate. A vibrating object often produces a sound, and the frequencies can be heard as the dominant tone and the overtones of the sound. The well-known question highlighting what spectral geometry is all about is the question "Can one hear the shape of a drum?" I am a mathematical analyst, and most of my research is in the area of spectral geometry. Problems in spectral geometry are also studied by various kinds of geometers, number theorists, applied mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and others. In mathematical terms, the natural frequencies of an object (or rather their squares) are the eigenvalues of a partial differential operator called the Laplacian. This Laplacian takes each function defined on the object and differentiates it twice to give a new function. The eigenvalues of the Laplacian form an infinite sequence of numbers tending to infinity. In spectral geometry we study how these numbers depends on the shape of the object. For people who like to know the full story, I should mention that many spectral geometers (including me) who work on the Laplacian on smooth manifolds study the whole sequence of eigenvalues of the Laplacian. Now the low eigenvalues can give accurate values for the frequencies at which a real-life object vibrates, but the very high eigenvalues do not correspond to genuine physical vibrations of the object because of molecular forces and damping. These effects are not included in the model where the vibration is driven by the Laplacian alone. This means that my research is rather different from that of an engineer who wishes to model precisely the vibrations of a real-life object. In actual fact the questions I work on are more closely related to mathematics arising in quantum physics and string theory. In addition, I don't always study the Laplacian, but also the eigenvalues of other operators, which might represent other physical quantities than the frequencies of vibration. I mostly study spectral geometry for nice smooth objects such as spheres and tori, but some people work on rough objects and even discrete objects like graphs. In the last eight years, I have worked mostly on the spectral zeta function, which is an infinite sum of powers of the eigenvalues. In particular, I have worked on the zeta-regularised determinant, which is used in topology, quantum field theory, and string theory. Recently, I have been very interested in the sum of squares of the wavelength of a surface, which is related to all kinds of different things including vortex theory."

"I cannot claim to find it easy to balance my ambitions in mathematical research with the desire to be a good parent, to be an inspiring teacher, or to effect positive social change in the world, I do feel very fortunate to be able to spend my life tackling these challenges, which are extremely interesting and important to me."

"Education cannot be defined by a simplistic preoccupation with fostering direct behavior change, which in many cases exemplifies the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The most significant behavior changes may be functions of perspective transformation, and such transformation is often an essential precondition for meaningful behavior changes."

"The egregious error of adult educators is to define our function solely as one of fostering behavior change and to act as though we believe our principal tasks are to do needs assessment surveys, to communicate ideas and to design exercises to develop specific knowledge, skills or attitudes for prescribed behavior change. Not only does this effort often become indoctrination to engineer consent, but it frequently addresses the wrong reality to begin with."

"We all require the meaning perspectives prescribed by our culture, but we have the potentiality of becoming critically aware of our perspectives and of changing them. By doing so, we move from an uncritical organic relationship to a self-consciously contractual relationship with individuals, institutions and ideologies. This is a crucial developmental task of maturity."

"Transformation in meaning perspective is precipitated by life’s dilemmas which cannot be resolved by simply acquiring more information, enhancing problem solving skills or adding to one’s competencies. Resolution of these dilemmas and transforming our meaning perspectives require that we become critically aware of the fact that we are caught in our own history and are re-living it and of the cultural and psychological assumptions which structure the way we see ourselves and others."

"Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, Greenest state in the Land of the Free, Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree, Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three— Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier."

"Scientific skepticism is considered good. ... Under this principle, one must question, doubt, or suspend judgment until sufficient information is available. Skeptics demand that evidence and proof be offered before conclusions can be drawn. ... One must thoughtfully gather evidence and be persuaded by the evidence rather than by prejudice, bias, or uncritical thinking."

"He worked hard. And now, he deserves to rest."

"“I actually wouldn’t tell my younger self a thing, ’cause she’s gonna figure out herself. I don’t want to change anything.” -this was from an article summarizing her comments in recent interviews about her mindset and journey, where she was asked what advice she would give her younger self."

"https://dailydot.com/alysa-liu-best-quotes"

"I’m here to announce that i am retiring from skating. I started skating when i was 5 so that’s about 11 years on the ice and it’s been an insane 11 years. a lot of good and a lot of bad. ... i feel so satisfied with how my skating career has gone. now that i’m finally done with my goals in skating i’m going to be moving on with my life."

"I was so into skating that I really didn’t do much else. Skating takes up your while life, almost. I don’t know if other people kind of feel the same when they look back at certain parts of their life, but for me, it’s definitely a blur, because it kind of meshes together, you know — going to the rink, going home, competing. There were many, many times when I didn’t enjoy it."

"The thing is, I love.... what I like to share about myself is like my story and my art — my creative process — and I guess messing up doesn’t take away from that. It’s still something, it’s still a story. A bad story is still a story, and I think that’s beautiful. There’s no way to lose."

"I’m so proud of her. The message that this is going to send to young athletes and parents alike that if you consider your mental health and treat it right, great things can happen."

"…the Chinese [Communist Party] government was aware of an Instagram post Alysa made about human rights violations against Uyghurs. For a regime sensitive to criticism, especially from high-profile figures, this was enough to put her on a list. Alysa Liu was not just a dissident’s daughter. She was a young American athlete who [had] publicly acknowledged the suffering of a persecuted minority. That combination made her a target. … It is rare for an Olympic gold medal to intertwine with a federal criminal case. It is even rarer for the athlete to be the daughter of a man who once fled China in a smuggler’s boat. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the story is Alysa’s reaction. When asked how she would portray this saga in a possible Hollywood movie, she said she would like to be a “super cool hero,” but the real focus should be on her father. His story, she said, is the one that matters. Alysa Liu’s saga is a reminder that the Chinese government’s campaign against dissidents extends far beyond its borders. It reaches into American cities, into immigrant communities, and even into the lives of children who have never set foot in China. It also reminds us that courage takes many forms. Sometimes it looks like a student leader refusing to betray his classmates in 1989. Sometimes it looks like a man gripping the side of a speeding boat in the dark, fleeing toward freedom. And sometimes it looks like a young woman stepping onto Olympic ice, knowing her family has been watched—and skating anyway."

"Welcome to the shock event, designed precisely to jar the and civil society, causing a disorientation and disruption among the public and the political class that aids the leader in consolidating... power. ...Trump gained power legally but... intends to shock or strike at the system, using the resulting ...chaos and flux to create a ...government... beholden only to the chief executive. ...Bannon has repeatedly talked about "destroying the state" in the name of securing power for "an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment." Besieging your targets until nothing makes any sense―giving them no time to absorb or recover from attacks―is a time-tested strategy in the history of... authoritarian takeovers. ...It's now being employed at the pinnacle of American democracy. ...With all the emergencies going on, who is bothered ...about ...Trump tax returns, or ...his ties to Russia?"

"I happened to see a video of... presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally. I saw him rouse the crowd to perform a loyalty oath... barely concealing the condescension for the crowd... I heard him talk about roughing up protesters and the media, and then.., "I could stand on 5th Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose any supporters." As a historian of authoritarian regimes... this was deeply familiar... This was a trial... to test the public, political elites and the press to see how... they would tolerate... extrajudiciality and violence. Authoritarians always tell you what they're going to do to you... [T]his is part of their politics of threat. Here was Donald Trump telling Americans... in January, 2016, that he approved of violent methods, could be violent himself, and considered himself above the law. The reactions..: a few expressions of incredulity... and a lot of "That's just Trump being Trump." ...Trump was following ...the authoritarian playbook, which most Americans ...were not familiar with. So I decided to educate people ...more than 60 op-eds ...[and] over 80 interviews to familiarize journalists with this ...analysis, and warn the public and decision-makers ...[P]ersonalist regimes..: the leader's personality.., obsessions.., quirks.., have an outsized influence over domestic and foreign policy. ...[H]is obsessions sometimes become state policy. Think of Hitler and the Jews... [T]he bad judgement caused by one of his worst character flaws, not wanting to take any criticism, can end... in ruinous situations and catastrophe for the nation, as... with Mussolini and Hitler... Trump is not fit to serve as leader... of American democracy, but he is... eminently fit to serve as the leader of an authoritarian state. ...[H]is impulsiveness, his mix of fragility and , ...his lack of empathy... and most disturbing, his willingness to... lead the country into ruin, to save his power and his source of personal enrichment, map 100%... on past authoritarian leaders' character[istics]. ...We have valuable knowledge to strike back, and yet, we haven't been doing it."

"We're living in a time of intense of these past regimes... including to remove their violence, so... Putin erects statues to Stalin, but then sends historians and others who comment on the s into penal colonies, and Amazon... sells t-shirts that say, "Pinochet did nothing wrong"... [etc.] ...I wrote it as an American watching Trump... holding rallies... s, and institutionalized lying, and I wanted to document and figure out this experience with some history. ...[I]t's the first book to put Trump's presidency in the context of 100 years of authoritarian rule."

"[F]or 100 years authoritarian leaders have invested in propaganda to convince people to believe their lies, to participate in their corruption, and accept their racism and violence as normal and necessary. ...Personality cults are key to success of authoritarian propaganda. ...20th century cults depend on mass-media... -mobilization and... -surveillance so the leader can seem omnipresent... [P]ropaganda is a set of communication strategies... to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is. ...From Mussolini's ...newsreels to Trump's and Bolsonaro's use of Twitter, authoritarians have had direct communications channels with the public... and... pose as authentic interpreters of the . ...Strong men disappear people, but they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their ideologies and goals. ...All 21st century authoritarians suppress climate change science because it discourages the plunder of s that generate profits for them and their cronies."

"We must... enact measures that reflect and reinforce the bedrock democratic principles of transparency, accountability, and solidarity. That means... instituting a... rigorous procedure for vetting presidential candidates, including disclosure of financial records and foreign and domestic business interests. We must... hold elected officials and candidates responsible for the language they use. Rogue statements, such as Trump's... boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters, should have consequences."

"People have to have circumstances that... they can't deny any more. ...[S]ometimes it takes a lot, like in the 1930a and 40s, the only thing that got some people to stop worshipping Hitler and Mussolini is when the Allies bombed them and they saw the destruction; ...or just... . It could be a pandemic, so Bolsonaro in Brazil is in trouble... Trump, one of the reasons he lost was the pandemic: criminal mismanagement. ...[P]rosecution is very important because some people worry, "Oh, if we prosecute Trump it'll cause a civil war" but the history shows that the only thing that bursts the bubble of a personality cult in the long run, is to see that these people are not... immortal, because these guys set themselves up as... gods. ...[T]hey're untouchable, "...Only I can fix it" ...[W]hen they are prosecuted, it happened to Berlusconi.., with Pinochet in Chile after he left office; that's the thing that leads a lot of people to turn their backs on them, when they're finally put to justice. So that they are human.., they are mortals after all."

"Trump wasn't just in office to wreck American democracy. He... was there to... detach America from a democratic world order and insert it into this developing autocratic order... [T]he reason he admired openly, publicly all autocrats: friendly... with Orbán.., admires Xi, and... attached to Putin... [A]ll of his campaigning against NATO.., digs at the EU, talking about globalism... is of a piece. It all relates. ...[W]hat Trump was able to do with the GOP, ... already going... in an authoritarian direction, but ...not ...pro-Russia. ...Trump managed to take the GOP and make it his personal tool... changed its ideas and sympathies about Russia.., that's... extraordinary. ...[T]hat's part of this big picture."

"[A] really important thing is the predominance of... survivalist ideologies. Great replacement theory is one... [T]o motivate people to... do violence, or... embrace the big lie, and to be corrupt, because that's a form of corruption: embracing election denial. You have to convince them that there's an existential threat, that they're in mortal danger... [T]hat's what Great Replacement theory does. That's... all this discourse on democratic cities as crime-ridden dens of anarchy... Giorgia Meloni... [H]er version of Great Replacement theory isn't just... demographic change and more non-whites being born (a more passive thing). She... believes... there's a plot by the EU and George Soros to flood Europe and Italy with non-white immigration... depressed wages of white workers and... extiguished white Christian civilization... Donald Trump is also a specialist in this, where on January 6th he said, "If we don't fight... we won't have a country any more!" The specter of obliteration. Instead of the obliteration that could come through climate change, you deny it and have a different kind of existential threat... affecting the white male minority, and you harness that rage."

"American voters should take Trump's enthusiasm for autocrats seriously. He is previewing the kind of leadership he will pursue... and doing his best to re-educate Americans to tolerate―or worse, even desire―an approach to governance that, wherever it has unfolded, has created despair and division―and often placed nations on a path to destruction, as with Germany under Hitler’s guide. [[w:Autocracy|[A]utocrat]]s... disregard... human rights and human dignity and... attempt to persuade people that it is in their interests to support governments that take their rights away. This seems to be Trump’s project... [N]o authoritarian has ever relinquished power once he gains it..."

"[T]he speed at which this is happening and the... concentrated push... doesn't have any parallel in situations where leaders came to power through elections. ...[T]he early Putin.., Orbán or Erdoğan ...didn't move at this speed. This resembles more [like] after there's been a coup."

"[[Ivana Trump|[H]is first wife]]... said that he had two books... one was Art of the Deal... which was ghost-written, and the other was Hitler's speeches, so he's very interested... in autocrats, and learning from them, but he doesn't read, so... it's a factor of having a similar personality... He wasn't in office to govern. He wanted to dominate people. He wanted to make money off of the presidency. ...[T]hey have similar personalities, and that's one reason they do similar things ...[T]hey ...very early ...start talking about violence. They start demonizing the press. They want to turn the public against journalists and make them political enemies, so that if anything comes out about their corruption, nobody will believe them. ...So there is this playbook that they use... [I]n the book I isolate these tools of... violence, , corruption, the myth of national greatness... and show what stays the same, and what changes over 100 years."

"[A]t a time when we face climate, health, food and other crises, the priority of authoritarian states is never public welfare, but maintaining stability... keeping the leader in power. ...[S]trongman leaders don't just endanger democracy, ...they pose an existential threat to humanity. ...[Y]et hundreds of millions ...embrace authoritarian lies and violence, so we need to understand why[.] ...Strongmen is about ...looking back in history, globally, for patterns ...[I]t ...put[s] Trump's America in historical perspective. ...[F]or 100 years charismatic leaders ...at moments of uncertainty and transition ...often come from outside the political system. Many... have a past in mass communications. ...They communicate with their followers in ...ways that seem original and thrilling. ...[A]uthoritarians ...appeal when societies have made ...gains in gender, class or racial emancipation and equity.., [and] sooth fears of the loss of male domination.., elite privilege, ...the end of white Christian "civilization." ...[C]ertain categories of enemies recur: ic peoples, Jews and Muslims, LGBTQ communities, indigenous people and more ...the throughlines of persecution. [A]uthoritarians get a boost from conservative elites... their most important promoters and collaborators... afraid of losing their privileges... often thinking that he can be controlled, and that never works out... They strike... the "authoritarian bargain"..: prosperity for... the elites in return for loyalty and toleration of... violence and suspension of rights."

"Trump's repeated elevation of dictators as models of leadership should be understood as part of a re-education strategy: conditioning Americans to see authoritarianism as a superior form of government to democracy. That is likely why he is explicitly making strongman rule his brand, telling Americans it is in their interest to allow him to save them from the supposed chaos and crime of democracy and give them an orderly authoritarian world under his control."

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a distinguished historian of and a prolific political commentator, belonged firmly to the alarm-bells camp over the past four years. Less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, she wrote an article titled “Donald Trump and Steve Bannon’s Coup in the Making.” Her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, elaborates on... the ways ambitious strongmen can damage or destroy democratic regimes. The book features Trump prominently, but it sets him in a rogues’ gallery of authoritarians and would-be authoritarians ranging from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to late-20th-century dictators like Augusto Pinochet, Moammar El-Gadhafi, and Idi Amin to present-day populists like Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro."

"The irony cannot be lost... government officials have used their positions to muscle out a scholar of authoritarianism from a prestigious lecture, aping the very tactics of censorship and political intimidation... associated with authoritarian states."

"Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen...will serve as a guidebook for navigating through this ongoing authoritarian turn in American politics. In examining the political tendencies, as well as dictatorships, of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi, and Augusto Pinochet, among others, Strongmen answers... questions perplexing... many... [and] brings to the fore stories of resistance, many based on personal interviews that give hope and encouragement. ...Ben-Ghiat’s historical evidence is repeatedly complimented with references ...to her authoritarian playbook... making it ...easy to see what such disparate figures as Berlusconi, Putin, and Trump share in common. Firsthand accounts from survivors of autocracies are interspersed... adding poignancy to the horror... [S]ocieties... faced with extreme ideological polarization and inter-communal tensions can either succumb to authoritarian forces or stop the cycle with , solidarity, and love. In... the United States, this may seem simplistic and even impossible, but these are what strongmen fear the most, and... keeping hope alive is an act of resistance. In clarifying the authoritarian formula, Strongmen is an exhortation to appreciate and collectively protect our fragile democracy."

"A leading expert on authoritarianism and history professor at New York University, Ben-Ghiat is the author of numerous books on Italian fascism, including... Strongman: Mussolini to the Present―which compares Donald Trump to Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet, among other dictators. She... has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump, regularly connecting his temperament and viewpoints to... dictators she studies. Ben-Ghiat had been invited by the Naval Academy’s history department to deliver the Bancroft Memorial Lecture... which... would focus on "what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule." ...[H]owever, the Naval Academy canceled the lecture ...after the urging of Congressman ..."