Academics From The United States

"You don't need to be the smartest person to be the most effective. Being effective means not just mastering the facts but figuring out how to move your agenda forward."

"Light a path for the better angels. The world is counting on you."

"The question is whether you'll tell your children that this decade was the beginning of a new dark age, or whether it was the time of something new and wonderful."

"Will you let darker angels win as you add fire to the flame, or will you seek out and spread real news?"

"Your brains have been rewired to process all this Net-based information. Your brains are dealing with the world in a different way than humans ever have. That kind of profound shift has occurred only six times in the entire 200,000-year history of Homo Sapiens. And you, here today, are the vanguard of the seventh wave"

"Only a few generations have been granted the role of determining whether a revolution in communication will allow our better angels – or our darker angels – to win. You leave here with incredible opportunity, but also with immense responsibility."

"I’ve watched how, in a blink of an eye, technology went from products used by the very few, to ending up in the pockets of billions, bringing social change and corporate disruption."

"The Silicon Valley culture is "I can win and you can win" - it isn't a sum-zero game."

"The #1 change in Silicon Valley is information density. If you think about it, 30 years ago the only way you got info was during one-on-one meetings. You knew very little and the world knew very little. We just know a lot more now."

"There are several generations of Silicon Valley CEOs who "pay-it-forward." It’s an understood, underground thing you don’t talk about. You give back to younger founders and entrepreneurs without asking for anything. The goal is to pass on what we learned to make our startup ecosystem better."

"The Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture used to be limited to a few entrepreneurial clusters. Now the Internet has spread that culture everywhere."

"Great entrepreneurs are revolutionaries. They speak truth to power. They change the status quo. They rebel against what exists. If you want to see what country will create the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, see how they treat their dissidents."

"Money is the lifeblood of startups. You stay in business until you run out of it."

"A startup is in reality a 'faith-based enterprise' on day one. To turn the vision into reality and the faith into facts (and a profitable company), a startup must test those guesses, or hypotheses, and find out which are correct."

"Customer Discovery is damn hard work. You can't fake it."

"Essential to the Catholic mind is what I would characterize as a keen sense of the prolongation of the Incarnation throughout space and time, an extension that is made possible through the mystery of the church. Catholics see God’s continued enfleshment in the oil, water, bread, imposed hands, wine, and salt of the sacraments; they appreciate it in the gestures, movements, incensations, and songs of the Liturgy; they savor it in the texts, arguments, and debates of the theologians; they sense it in the graced governance of popes and bishops; they love it in the struggles and missions of the saints; they know it in the writings of Catholic poets and in the cathedrals crafted by Catholic architects, artists, and workers. In short, all of this discloses to the Catholic eye and mind the ongoing presence of the Word made flesh, namely Christ."

"I will confess that my two forays into the Reddit space have been more than a little discouraging. If you dare, look at the dismaying number of just plain aggressive and mean-spirited comments."

"God created the world through an active speech. God's Word is not descriptive, it is creative. God speaks the worls is being...God's Word changes, it is effective, makes things happen...What God says, is. If Jesus is just a spiritual teacher among many, one great religious figure, okay, fine. But there are thousands of those. What claims the Church is He is not a human figure amomg many, but He is the Word made flesh. The very embodiement of God [as a] transformative and creative work. The night before he dies, that Jesus took bread, the Pasqual bead, and said: "This is my Body." Taking the goblet with the meal, said: "This is the chalice of my Blood". If that [was said] by a human being, a great hero, a philosopher, a social reformer, okay, we say: "He is using a symbolic talk." But who is saying that? The Word made flesh. The Word whose speech constitutes reality at the deepest level. Just as if God spokes you to be, so Jesus speaks His presence into being, over the appearence of bread and wine...We move into His very identity at that point. We now commence to speak in the first person, saying: "Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my Body given for you." We speak in persona Christi, we speak in the very Word of Jesus."

"The Mass is a priviledged encounter with Jesus Christ. Christianity is not a philosophy, is not a social theory, is not an ideology, Christianity is a relationship with Christ, it is a friendship with Him. Everything in Christianity relates to and comes back to that friendship. What's the Mass? The Mass is the most intense way to see the ethernity that we can commune with Jesus."

"There is a regrettable interpretation of the cross that has, unfortunately, infected the minds of many Christians. This is the view that the bloody sacrifice of the Son on the cross was “satisfying” to the Father, and appeasement of a God infinitely angry at sinful humanity. In this reading, the crucified Jesus is like a child hurled into the fiery mouth of a pagan divinity in order to assuage its wrath. But what ultimately refutes this twisted theology is the well-known passage from John’s Gospel: “God so loved the world, that he sent his only Son, that all who believe in him might have eternal life.” John reveals that it is not out of anger or vengeance or in a desire for retribution that the Father sends the Son, but precisely out of love. God the Father is not some pathetic divinity whose bruised personal honor needs to be restored; rather God is a parent who burns with compassion for his children who have wandered into danger."

"The ISIS barbarians were actually quite right in entitling their video “A Message Written in Blood.” Up and down the centuries, tyrants and their lackeys have thought that they could wipe out the followers of Jesus through acts of violence. But as Tertullian observed long ago, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. And they were furthermore right in sending their message to “the Nation of the Cross.” But they should know that the cross taunts them."

"In the society of Jesus’s time, physical illness was typically construed as a curse, and in many cases sickness or deformity prevented one from participating fully in the life of the community, especially in common worship. Curing the blind, the deaf, the lame, and the leprous, Jesus was Yahweh binding up the wounds of his people and restoring them to communion."

"Paul consistently proclaimed that the church of Jesus Christ is not so much an organization as an organism, a mystical body. I will present the church accordingly as a living thing, whose purpose is to gather the whole world into the praise of God. And the central act of the church, its “source and summit” in the words of Vatican II, is the Liturgy, the ritualized praise of God. I will therefore walk through the gestures, songs, movements, and theology of the Liturgy. The entire purpose of the Liturgy and the church is to make saints, to make people holy. This is why Catholicism takes the saints, in all their wild diversity, with such seriousness and why it presents them to us with such enthusiasm."

"The Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue…To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church. However, here’s the flip side. The Catholic Church couples its extraordinary moral demand with an extraordinarily lenient penitential system. The Church mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute. To grasp both of these extremes is to understand the Catholic approach to morality."

"The denial of God conduced to the denial of God-given rights – and that, in turn, conduced to rights becoming eminently alienable whenever it served the purposes of the government."

"Journalism is the most Americanized of all professions, and nothing is more American than the belief that economic matters trump ideological ones. There is very little talk of ideology in coverage of any country. Western journalists here see a poor North facing off against a rich South and laugh at the notion that the former might have serious designs on the latter. They don’t seem aware of what I call the South’s state-loyalty deficit."

"[I]n South Korea, where support for social welfare and public health care is virtually universal, as is opposition to mass immigration, it’s largely one's attitude to North Korea that decides whether one counts as "progressive" or "conservative.""

"South Koreans do not identify enough with their "unloved republic" to feel anger when the North humiliates it, and they are reassured enough by the military alliance with the United States not to worry about where all this appeasement will lead."

"[T]he North owes its security not to nuclear weapons, but to American fears that even a minor strike on the North would result in devastating retaliation against Seoul. Any consistent outward improvement of inter-Korean relations naturally casts doubt on the automaticity of such retaliation and therefore undermines the North’s security. The consequence is that the Kim regime must walk a tightrope. On the one hand it must project reasonableness and an openness to negotiations, while on the other it has to project great volatility and excitability, a readiness to stop at nothing."

"[T]here has long been in the North a very real contempt for the South Korean left, the kind that radicals always feel for moderates no matter how obsequious the latter might be. Believe it or not, there were always more South Koreans willing to work with the North than it was willing to work with; the history of the underground in the 1960s and 1970s is replete with tales of how this or that Kim disciple got cold-shouldered by the DPRK embassy in East Berlin and had to go begging for funds in Japan instead."

"[O]ne cannot respect the orthodox version of history without perpetuating the ideology behind it."

"To count as a conspiracy, a plan involving two or more parties must be covert. Not even Alex Jones would talk of a Democratic Party conspiracy to field a candidate who can beat Trump. The term “conspiracy theory” is to be used and understood accordingly. Had Lee Harvey Oswald spoken just before his death of a second gunman on the grassy knoll, one would not be a conspiracy theorist for taking him seriously. The information could still be wrong, but someone disagreeing with it would have to engage in actual refutation. The same goes for all who seek to dismiss talk of the ROK government’s confederation drive as a conspiracy theory."

"North Korea’s interest in confederation is in first disarming and then eliminating the rival state."

"I don’t buy the common notion that if the US and South Korea promise convincingly enough never to topple the Kim dictatorship from without, it will let itself be toppled slowly from within."

"[S]omeone who doesn’t know a country’s history is bound to chuckle at the things its people worry about."

"Let's remember not only how many South Koreans were killed, injured or abducted during a war the North started, but also that one of the most shocking parts of that conflict for people who experienced KPA occupation was seeing neighbors emerge on day one as fully-formed, snitching supporters of the enemy. Many bore titles in the underground organizations to which, it turned out, they had belonged for years. In several recorded cases they denounced people who were shot on the spot. That trauma sits deep."

"Here’s what I find odd. While South Koreans’ anti-Japanese sentiment gets taken at face value as the inevitable result of what happened well before most of them were born, conservatives’ fears for the security of the South, which was last subjected to a deadly military attack in 2010, tend to be treated as laughable delusions."

"Nationalism is about putting the (ethno-)nation above liberal-democratic and leftist values alike. Once one takes that step, one is not separated from other nationalists by anything irreducible."

"What was once the nationalist Left is now the Nationalist left. The candlelight protests of 2016 are mythologized by Moon himself not as class struggle or anti-corruption drive but as the culmination of a long heroic fight for national liberation. The implication — kept tacit to let sleeping American dogs lie — is that by working with Washington against Pyongyang, Park Geun-hye betrayed the race, the minjok."

"LKP carries on the tradition of President Kim Young Sam (1993-98). Like him it has no firm political principles."

"[E]nough of history; as I’ve said before, it’s what’s done with it to contemporary ends that matters. Plenty will be done in the months ahead, to harmonizing North-South effects that the Western commentariat will cheer, and polarizing ROK-internal effects it will continue dozing through. It’s not America’s place to meddle, but we should be aware of what our supposedly liberal-democratic ally is up to."

"[I]t was the Yankees and not Korean “reds” – a tiny force even in their 1920s heyday — whom the Japanese authorities were most intent on infamizing. After Hirohito’s surrender all the main tropes went straight into the agitprop of the South Korean left. Thus did the Workers’ Party vilify Yankees as “bloodsuckers” when agitating Jeju islanders, who had been subjected to especially intense Japanese propaganda during the war."

"[W]hat really changed a generally pro-socialist South Korean public in 1950 to a right-leaning one was a brief taste of North Korean rule. Kim Sŏng-ch’il, for example, writes in his diary of how the KPA occupation made him identify with the ROK for the first time."

"The US-ROK alliance’s position on North Korea has been inexorably softening, with only minor and temporary reversals, for over half a century now, while North Korea, arming steadily, has always held fast to its commitment to “final victory,” to unification under its own flag. One need only take a few steps back from the daily news to see where this is headed."

"While watching Moon and Kim disport themselves on Mount Paektu — the modern nationalist myth of the ancient iconicity of which mountain our media swallowed hook, line and sinker — I was struck by a sobering thought: It has already become easier to imagine Seoul with a Kim Il Sung statue than to imagine Pyongyang without one. Not a lot easier, but easier. We may all disagree about what exactly a North-South league will mean, or even whether it will come to pass. But let’s stop the denials — the old-fashioned denials — that this is what the two Koreas are working on."

"These days people like Yi are more likely to end up in the Blue House or KBS than in jail."

"[O]bservers regard the word nationalism (now a pejorative in the West) as inappropriate for what they see as a natural, healthy yearning to make the peninsula whole again. But a distinction must be made between: a) feelings of ethnic community, pride in a shared cultural tradition, and a sense of special humanitarian duty to one’s own people, all of which West Germans felt in 1989-90 despite being generally anti-nationalist, and b) an ideological commitment to raising the stature of one’s race on the world stage. What holds South Korean nationalists together is b) and not a). This can be seen by their inordinate horror of the financial and social disruptions of unification, which in the past has actuated deliberate exaggeration of the likely costs, and which still induces many Moon-supporters to propose maintaining a one-nation, two-state system indefinitely. We see it also in the general indifference to human rights abuses in the North, and in the great pleasure and pride the ROK's envoys showed last week at being in the dictator’s presence."

"Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don’t want to live up there anymore than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal."

"Ideology, legitimacy, authority: Such topics used to interest academics no end. The mania for quantifying the social sciences and the attendant decline in foreign-language acquisition have changed things. I remember Sovietologists lamenting this trend when I was at school in the 1980s. It’s gone much, much further since. What cannot be researched with the proper statistical-numerical methodology is thought beneath serious analysis. On the rare occasions when a non-quantifier takes the microphone at a conference, the Gradgrinds lean back with an indulgent smile: Time for some light relief."

"Imagining what will have to happen before the Western commentariat begins taking Korean nationalism seriously is an instructive exercise. I thought the two leaders’ trip to Mount Paektu on September 20 might do the trick. But foreigners are still talking only of Moon’s peace-minded pragmatism and Kim’s desire for security guarantees and investment."