Academics From The United States

"If Origen ... is right that God's final victory over the forces of evil and rebellion will be effected not through force and necessity but through reason and wisdom, then the possibility for a real synergy between man's efforts and God's will becomes feasible and even probable. To posit wisdom as God's chief tool for subjecting the universe is tantamount to suggesting that God will accomplish his plan on earth by appealing—in a very Platonic manner—to our reason through a sort of divine rhetoric rather than by terrifying our bodies through the force of his divine wrath."

"Seriously, this is an error huge enough to make me wonder about everything else, in particular whether he got his MPH out of a cereal box. This guy has an MPH and doesn’t know (or didn’t bother to find out) how VAERS actually works and that there are other vaccine safety monitoring systems other than VAERS? ... Dr. McCullough should have stuck to cardiology and renal disease, the two areas for which he was known prior to the pandemic that led him, as he characterized it in the video, to completely reorient the focus of his academic career. I guess the opportunity for grift and conspiracy theories was too much for him to resist....someone like Dr. McCullough, who has an MPH in addition to his MD, should really, really, really know better. That he promotes antivaccine disinformation based on fear mongering about reports to VAERS of deaths and adverse events tells me one of two things. Either his MPH education failed him, or he’s lying. Take your pick."

"In addition to its anti-vax hosts, the network also hosts one guest after another to rail against the vaccines. “No one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines,” an anti-covid-vaccine doctor told Laura Ingraham on Wednesday evening’s program."

"And then there's the relentless disinformation campaign coming from right-wing media. Here's a little taste: On Wednesday night this week, Fox News host Laura Ingraham interviewed a doctor who proclaimed that "unless we really have a compelling case, no one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines." That's the sort of dangerous fear-mongering conservative viewers see every day, even as thousands of them are still dying."

"By elevating witnesses who sound smart but endorse unfounded therapies, we risk jeopardizing a century’s work of medical progress."

"Unless we really have a compelling case, no one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines."

"There is no reason right now — no clinical reason to go get vaccinated."

"It's clear we can't vaccinate our way out of this."

"Mr. Wharton's views are not stated, but might be inferred from the Wharton estate's holding of 100,000 acres in New Jersey, lying between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. This land supported towns and industries in the 18th century, but under the Whartons went out of use"

"We have to make some decisions now."

"It was Mill who popularized the idea of raising taxes on landowners only after first compensating them, thus buying the right to tax them. It was a selective scruple: neither Mill nor anyone, to my knowledge, ever proposed compensating workers, consumers, or the owners of capital before taxing them. It was something of a red herring, because it assured that net revenues would be about zero. It simply gave debaters something to chew on while precluding meaningful action."

"This is the public health crisis of the century, and doctors should not have barriers."

"Medieval stories are attractive because the heroes have fewer resources at their disposal. The greatest warrior is the one who is strongest, most skilled, most resourceful, and most clever, rather than just the one with the biggest gun or the most bombs. Personal achievement looms larger when you remove the technology."

"Our first precondition of the coup, therefore, is: The social and economic conditions of the target country must be such as to confine political participation to a small fraction of the population... The second precondition of the coup, therefore, is: The target state must be substantially independent, and the influence of foreign powers in its internal political life must be relatively limited... The third precondition of the coup, therefore, is: The target state must have a political center. If there are several centers, these must be identifiable, and they must be politically, rather than ethnically, structured. If the state is controlled by a nonpolitically organized unit, the coup can only be carried out with its consent or neutrality."

"An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat."

"Perfectly ordinary regular armed forces, with no counterinsurgency doctrine or training whatever, have in the past regularly defeated insurgents, by using a number of well-proven methods. It is enough to consider these methods to see why the armed forces of the United States or of any other democratic country cannot possibly use them."

"Yes, you can convert [Afghanistan] into Sweden, but you'll need four hundred years, and you have to kill three quarters of the males in Afghanistan probably in three generations, one after the other, to be able to do it."

"... after six hours and a half of climbing from Camp No. 4, we stood on the top of . We found the top almost flat for an area of nearly an acre. It is oval in shape, 100 feet north and south, and 175 feet east and west. It falls off rather abruptly on the north side, moderately on the west, and very gently for some distant to the south and east. It is almost impossible to describe the view. Snow-capped ranges lay to the north and east. Isolated peaks covered with snow and occasional glaciers sprang up here and there in the great desert solitudes, but there was hardly an atom of green to be seen anywhere. We stood on top and in the middle of a dead world. Not even a was in sight. We might have been on the moon."

"The natives while working on the mines are very well treated. They live in compounds, which appeared to be run on model lines. I was told that there had been cases of brutality and ill-treatment, but the compound managers concerned had been instantly dismissed. The Union Minière are strongly opposed to anything in the nature of brutal treatment of the natives."

"The Belgians are setting about the task of combating the shortage of labour with almost Teutonic thoroughness and far-sightedness."

"Agustín Lizárraga is discoverer of Machu Picchu and lives at San Miguel Bridge just before passing"

"Although market socialist theory will remain seriously incomplete until appropriate theories of bureaucratic, managerial, and worker motivation are developed, market socialism is clearly an alternative to private ownership which must be taken seriously, even if we restrict our view to considerations of efficiency alone."

"Speaking generally, it may be said that the authorities of the Union Minière are in advance of the Mining Companies in this Territory [Rhodesia] in the care and attention they give to recruited labour."

"I have always been terrified by the idea that my photographs would be “just” beautiful. Beauty is often seen as lacking in substance. Over time, I have become confident in my ability to apprehend situations that are defined by a kind of complicated beauty, when you are pulled in by the beauty but also pushed back by something problematic."

"I certainly want to give my viewer the ability to “step into” an image and have a physical and mental experience, so it is necessary that the print be large enough; for me, that’s fifty to sixty inches wide, which is rather modest."

"Biography can be a red herring in visual art. For writers it’s a genre and a process. They organize life stories, and I imagine that the craft of biography or autobiography is largely about organizing facts in a compelling way. For me, biography is interchangeable with curiosity. My story has been valuable to my work only because it provided me with intense curiosity about certain situations, places, and sensations."

"While my return to Vietnam was intensely emotional, connecting to the landscape allowed me to disengage somewhat and gain perspective. I wanted to show Vietnam in a way I had not seen it shown before—not devastated, not victimized, not romanticized. I felt I could do that best through my exploration of the landscape."

"One’s “authentic self” does not consist in the sum total of one’s biological urges (especially those oriented toward what God expressly forbids) but rather in one’s conformity to the image of Jesus Christ, which includes taking up one’s cross, denying oneself, losing one’s life, and following him."

"We never thought we could or would return to Vietnam. It was almost 20 years before the possibility arose. Memories are ever shifting when you live in exile."

"Clearly there’s some entity that doesn’t really include us, the professors and students, and doesn’t really protect our academic freedom, I think, the way that it should."

"Landscape, at its best, is not a narrow category. It is a source of surprise. It allows for the sudden assertion of a place, like an unexpected time signature within a melody."

"One thing great journalists and artists have in common is a desire to be surprised, to find yourself with way more than you bargained for when you began an inquiry with little more than a sense of intuition."

"The one constant in my life is the landscape, in a broad sense of the word. I love the openness of the land and worry about how we’ve built our lives upon it, how little we maintain it, and how we assault it. It’s one reason for me to want to photograph it."

"I am acutely aware of the complex role Vietnam plays, as both history and myth, in the country I have adopted as my own and in the culture I have raised my children. I can’t say I embrace every American characterisation of Vietnam. But I see the Hollywood clichés, the lasting psychic scars and even the cheap fetishes as expressions of something very real and very human. Vietnam remains an unavoidable and unresolved subject. As history, place and subject, it is still unfolding."

"At this time of crisis, I find great comfort in returning to nature, the wilderness, the richness and vast scale of the land. It has shaped the American identity; circling back to the landscape gives me hope for the future."

"I think anyone can make one, two great photographs. It is the endeavor, the sustained effort and exploration of an idea or a subject that is more significant."

"Reading in both its literal and metaphoric senses is a crucial constituent of the problem of language, and it is reciprocally related to writing. A mode of reading implies a mode of writing (and vice versa). In this sense, a different mode of reading would imply that the writing of history would also undergo significant variations and that historical works might take different forms."

"Tocqueville certainly wants to be meticulous in his research and accurate in his facts. He makes pointed reference to all the archives he has visited and is manifestly concerned about establishing his narrative and analytic authority. But he is also preoccupied with the problem of proximity and distance in his relation to his subject matter. And he does at times question himself, change voices, and make explicit but modulated use of irony, parody, and other rhetorical devices. Tocqueville thus enacts one form of dialogic exchange with the past, a form in some instances so pronounced that it may disconcert more conventional historians who might otherwise find congenial his methodology, his balanced and often mellifluous style, and his basic conception of historical discourse. He also manifests a tension between a desire for objectivity and an involvement or implication in the events he treats. At certain times his voice is explicitly normative and performative, particularly with reference to his desire to give his defence of liberty implications for the present and future."

"For Foucault the true voices of unreason in the modern period went underground in art and literature, and they lacked a sustaining sociocultural background. The unmoored voices of unreason in an obscure dialogue with reason seemed to come not out of the cosmos or even out of a more delimited cultural context but out of the void. Here Foucault refers to such iconic figures as Nietzsche, Holderlin, Artaud, and Sade. He tellingly contrasts the paintings of Bosch and Goya. In Bosch, unreason is a subterranean force of the cosmos; in Goya (at least in certain paintings), unreason erupts from an abyss."

"Genealogical history in both Tocqueville and Foucault begins with an important if not burning issue in the present and traces it back to its often concealed or repressed roots in the past. The purpose of such inquiry is not purely antiquarian. History for both men involves an at times intense involvement or implication of the historian in the object studied and an active exchange between the present and the past in ways that may be useful in shaping the future."

"I have no synoptic formula for resolving the various problems I have tried to raise. I would simply end by saying that what emerges from my discussion is the necessity and the difficulty of linking the history of criticism to criticism itself—criticism that is not only literary but sociocultural and political as well. Another way to state this point is to reiterate the need to come to terms with the problem of transference in the relation between past and present. In this respect, the practice of the critic would have to engage the issue of its own situation in the complex intellectual and institutional network formed by elite, official, popular, and “mass” (or commodified) culture. Countering the temptation to replicate in one’s own protocols of interpretation some of the most questionable features of cultural history is for the critic writing the history of criticism—or indeed any form of history—an endeavor that is substantive and self-reflexive at the same time."

"If the novel is read at all in history, it is typically because it may be employed as a source telling us something factual about the past. Its value is in its referential functions—the way it serves as a window on life or developments in the past. The historian’s focus is, accordingly, on the content of the novel—its representation of social life, its characters, its themes, and so forth. In a word, the novel is pertinent to historical research to the extent that it may be converted into useful knowledge or information."

"Contexts of interpretation are at least three-fold; those of writing, reception, and critical reading."

"The interactions between metropolitan France and its former colonies have been complex, often hegemonically skewed, and typically strained. Still, any understanding of francophone literature and culture should, I think, attempt not to isolate it but to explore its contested relations with the metropole and with figures and intellectual or cultural forces that are themselves not simply metropolitan but often internally complex, self-contradictory, hybridized, or riven."

"Rhetoric involves a dialogical understanding of discourse and of “truth” itself in contrast to a monological idea of a unified authorial voice providing an ideally exhaustive and definitive (total) account of a fully mastered object of knowledge. Historiography is dialogical in that, through it, the historian enters into a “conversational” exchange with the past and with other inquirers seeking an understanding of it. The problem is the nature of the conversation."

"Let only the eager, thoughtful and reverent enter here."

"Rhetoric includes “performative” uses of language that make a difference in one’s relation to the object of study. This does not mean that the historian is obliged to resort to explicit moral judgments, overt didacticism in drawing lessons, or “show and tell” sessions in which one’s values or autobiographical propensities are bared to one’s audience. The more direct forms of public exposure generally serve a purgative function and rarely inform an account in a telling or transformative way."

"They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind."

"Contemporary sociocultural history was in part motivated by a justifiable revolt against an abstracted history of ideas. But it has often tended simply to reverse the latter’s assumptions (through reductionism) and to replicate its documentary treatment of artifacts (as symptoms of society or economy rather than mind). It has also replicated an all-too-prevalent social reaction to intellectual history’s objects of study (both artifacts and artists or intellectuals)."

"Rhetoric exceeds not only documentary or referential but all utilitarian, workaday, and instrumental functions of language. It involves verbal display or performance in a sense larger than that comprised in the standard notion of the “performative.”"