Academics From England

"Aaron is dead. Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child. Let us all weep."

"We’ve lost a fighter. We’ve lost somebody who put huge energy into righting wrongs. There are people around the world who take it on themselves to just try to fix the world but very few of them do it 24/7 like Aaron. Very few of them are as dedicated. So of the people who are fighting for right, and what he was doing up to the end was fighting for right, we have lost one of our own. … We’ve lost a great person."

"This is for everyone"

"The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people."

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."

"When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA. … Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it. Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations. I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated."

"Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind."

"When you go out there, the webpages you see are written by people. You're looking at a certain sub-set of the churning mass of humanity out there. So it's not that the web itself is an animal, but it's that society is this really exciting, decentralized thing, and the web, fortunately, is more or less able to echo it."

"The term 'fundamentalist', which was coined in 1920, derives from the title of a series of tracts - The Fundamentals - published in the United States from 1910 to 1915. It has since been implicitly defined as meaning a person who believes that, since The Bible is the Word of God, every proposition in it must be true; a belief which, notoriously, is taken to commit fundamentalist Christians to defending the historicity of the accounts of the creation of the Universe given in the first two chapters of Genesis. On this understanding a fully believing Christian does not have to be fundamentalist. Instead it is both necessary and sufficient to accept the Apostles' and/or The Nicene Creed. In Islam, however, the situation is altogether different. For, whereas only a very small proportion of all the propositions contained in the Old and New Testaments are presented as statements made directly by God in any of the three persons of the Trinity, The Koran consists entirely and exclusively of what are alleged to be revelations from Allah (God). Therefore, with regard to The Koran, all Muslims must be as such fundamentalists; and anyone denying anything asserted in The Koran ceases, ipso facto, to be properly accounted a Muslim. Those whom the media call fundamentalists would therefore better be described as revivalists. This conceptual truth not only places a tight limitation upon the possibilities of developmental change within Islam, as opposed to the tacit or open abandonment of one or more of its original particular claims, but also opens up the theoretical possibility of falsifying the Islamic system as a whole by presenting some known fact which is inconsistent with a Koranic assertion."

"The Koran calls for belief and consequent obedience. It is, surely, calculated to inspire fear, indeed abject terror, rather than love."

"A less important point which needs to be made in this piece is that although the index of The God Delusion notes six references to Deism it provides no definition of the word ‘deism’. This enables Dawkins in his references to Deism to suggest that Deists are a miscellany of believers in this and that. The truth, which Dawkins ought to have learned before this book went to the printers, is that Deists believe in the existence of a God but not the God of any revelation. In fact the first notable public appearance of the notion of Deism was in the American Revolution."

"The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’)."

"[Still an atheist at the time] For Heaven's sake...sorry, perhaps I should have said something else."

"I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam."

"What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?"

"'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

"John Langshaw Austin... made a number of contributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work on knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the use of language in speech acts. Distinctions that Austin draws in his work on speech acts — in particular his distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts — have assumed something like canonical status in more recent work. His work on knowledge and perception places him in a broad tradition of “Oxford Realism”, running from Cook Wilson and Harold Arthur Prichard through to J. M. Hinton, M. G. F. Martin, John McDowell, Paul Snowdon, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. His work on truth has played an important role in recent discussions of the extent to which sentence meaning can be accounted for in terms of truth-conditions."

"Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us."

"However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction."

"Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word."

"Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers."

"Like "real", "free" is only used to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses. As "truth" is not a name of a characteristic of assertions, so "freedom" is not a name for a characteristic of actions, but the name of a dimension in which actions are assessed."

"We become obsessed with "truth" when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with "freedom" when discussing conduct...Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal."

"But suppose we take the noun "truth": here is a case where the disagreements between different theorists have largely turned on whether they interpreted this as a name of a substance, of a quality, or of a relation."

"If we say that I only get at the symptoms of his anger, that carries an important implication. But is this the way we do talk?"

"Ordinary language blinkers the already feeble imagination."

"Faced with the nonsense question "What is the meaning of a word?" and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up."

"It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence."

"But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense "red" and "blue" any more than "resemblance" (or "qualities" any more than "relations"): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that "this is red.""

"In one sense "there are" both universals and material objects, in another sense there is no such thing as either: statements about each can usually be analysed, but not always, nor always without remainder."

"Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?"

"The Nicomachean Ethics is only intended as a guide for politicians, and they are only concerned to know what is good, not what goodness means ... and in any case one can know what things are good without knowing the analysis of "good"."

"There are more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in butter; but this is the sort of thing (as the proverb indicates) we overlook: there are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely."

"Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts."

"We speak of people "taking refuge" in vagueness — the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enough."

"Sentences are not as such either true or false."

"Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with "motive" or "impulse", but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity."

"I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission; and will, at any rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the Divine government, which would have us believe pain to be an oversight and a mistake, — to be corrected by and by. On the other hand, the predominance of happiness among living things — their lavish beauty — the secret and wonderful harmony which pervades them all, from the highest to the lowest, are equally striking refutations of that modern Manichean doctrine, which exhibits the world as a slave-mill, worked with many tears, for mere utilitarian ends. There is yet another way in which natural history may, I am convinced, take a profound hold upon practical life, — and that is, by its influence over our finer feelings, as the greatest of all sources of that pleasure which is derivable from beauty."

"His voice was low, clear and distinct... Professor Huxley's method is slow, precise, and clear, and he guards the positions that he takes with astuteness and ability. He does not utter anything in reckless fashion which conviction sometimes countenances and excuses, but rather with the deliberation that research and close inquiry foster."

"Oh, there goes Professor Huxley; faded but still fascinating."

"I'm a good Christian woman — I'm not an infidel like you!"

"If he has a fault it is... that like Caesar, he is ambitious... cutting up apes is his forté, cutting up men is his foible."

"I believed that he was the greatest man I was ever likely to meet, and I believe that all the more firmly today."

"The papers are printed and circulated among the members, and begin to form a little volume. Among the contributors have been Archbishop Huxley and Professor Manning."

"With this viewpoint in mind, he was continually trying to find connecting links by considering likenesses between man, for instance, and the various stocks inferior to him (1); and it must be admitted that in his attempt a great many unlikenesses and dissimilarities and fundamental differences, all of extreme importance, were either ignored entirely, or — may I say it? — willfully slurred over. It was the old, old story, both in Huxley's case and in Haeckel's: what was good for their theories was accepted and pressed home to the limit; and what was contrary to their theories was either ignored or suppressed. We submit that, great as these men were each in his own field, such a procedure is not a truly scientific one. We can excuse their enthusiasm; but an excuse is not by any means an extension of sympathy to the mistake."

"Huxley was a man of very similar scientific type of mind (Ernst Heinrich Haeckel), but with another psychological bent to his genius. He was psychologized with the idea that there was an end-on or continuous or uniserial evolution in the developmental history of animate beings; that is, that one type led to another type — the highest of the lower order or family or group passed by degrees into the lowest of the next following or higher group. His whole lifework was based on this theory; and all his teachings — backed by much biological research and anatomical knowledge, and other factors that make a man's words carry weight — had immense vogue for these reasons."

"The psychology of the times following the publication of Darwin's works was so strong that most thinking men could not then be brought to admit that there were any alternative explanations of the phenomena of progressive development in life — human, animal, or plant life — to the scheme of transformism which he set forth. This psychological phenomenon was brought about mainly by the efforts of two men...Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel."

"The illustrious comparative anatomist, Huxley, Darwin's great general in the battles that had to be fought, but not a naturalist, far less a student of living nature."

"Huxley gave the death-blow not only to Owen's theory of the skull but also to Owen's hitherto unchallenged prestige."