Academics From The United States

"Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I'm trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are."

"Maybe he's growing up. Or maybe he just needed the right circumstances to discover the best in himself."

"I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives."

"Doesn't love show its face when it satisfies the need of the loved one, for the loved one's sake alone?"

"I interpreted all you did as weakness — but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don't deserve it."

"You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told. So do all good people. That's what it means to be a good person."

"Show him who I am, so he will pity me instead of fearing me. And then we can turn pity into compassion, and compassion into understanding, and understanding into affection, and affection into love, and love into life, the life of our children, the life of the new self we will become together."

"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."

"Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist. Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it."

"The others are even more likely to obey their god. Which is? It dangles between their legs."

"You always back off at the exact moment when you're about to tell the other person exactly what she needs to hear."

"If I wanted to doubt then I could doubt endlessly. But at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in."

"Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will — will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth."

"Will I be coming to you as husband or a child? A partner or a student?"

"Stop threatening me... I've lived in terror and I've come out of it. Kill me or not, torture me or not, it doesn't matter to me. Just decide what to do."

"We are all fools when one wise man appears."

"How does he do it? How does he master people without bluster or bullying? How does he make people fear him or love him, not in spite of his ruthlessness but because of it?"

"Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause."

"Keep me alive. Keep me alive long enough for me to conquer the animal within myself. Long enough for me to learn to partner myself with a woman who is better and stronger than me. Long enough for me to reconcile myself with my brothers. Long enough to be as good a man as my father, and as good as my mother, too."

"It was not love at all, really, but rather a yearning for the honor and respect of the other men that held them. Pride, then... Indeed, all their connection with each other at this moment was tied up with the respect they felt they were earning by their actions."

"I have no way of knowing that your story is not true — but you have no way of knowing that my story isn't true. So I will choose the one that I love. I will close the one that, if it's true, makes this reality one worth living in. I'll act as if the life I hope for is real life, and the life that disgusts me — your life, your view of life — is the lie."

"I was forgetting how it really was, I was remembering it through common, ordinary eyes, I was remembering it as the boy I was before, but now I remember that it wasn't me being weak or me being naked, or anything else that I should be ashamed of."

"You think my apology means I'm weak. But it doesn't. It means I am trying to learn how to be strong."

"Not that human beings need to be violent in order to be human, but if you ever lose the will to control, the will to destroy, then it must be because you choose to lose it. My role was not to force you to be gentle and kind; it was to keep you alive while you decided for yourselves what kind of people you wanted to be."

"Wouldn't it have been better to change humanity so it no longer desired to destroy itself?"

"I will not be tamed, only persuaded. I will not be coerced or led blindly or tricked or bullied - I am willing only to be convinced. If you don't trust your own basic goodness enough to tell me what you're trying to do... Then you're confessing your own moral weakness and I'll never serve you."

"Permanence was always an illusion, and love was just the disguise that lovers wore to hide the death of their union from each other for a while."

"Here's my throat. I carry no weapon. You could have killed me at any time, even when I knew you were my enemy. Why did you need to deceive me into trusting you first? Were you afraid that death wouldn't bother me enough, unless I felt betrayed?"

"How could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?"

"Why won't anyone ever answer my questions?" "Because you never stop asking them and especially because you keep asking them even when it's clear that nobody knows the answers." "Well, how do I know that they don't know the answer unless I ask?"

"I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them." "A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed."

"Nafai knew the rule: when a man acts like a child, he's boyish, and everyone's delighted; when a boy acts the same way, he's childish, and everyone tells him to be a man."

"I've seen Australia and I've lived on an asteroid and I'd take the asteroid."

"'Waterloo was won,'" quoted Rackham, "'on the playing fields of Eton.'" "What the hell does that mean?" asked Carn Carby. "You never even went to Eton." "It was an analogy," said Rackham. "If you hadn't spent your entire childhood playing war games, you'd actually know something. You're all so uneducated."

"I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be, Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are, and go ahead and LEAD."

""And you actually were cuddly," said Carn. "No offense, but you were spunky." "If that's your word for 'bratty little asshole,' said Dink mildly."

"Such fools they were in Battle School, to let so few girls in. It left the boys completely helpless against a woman when they returned to Earth."

"I may be down, but never out. An infantry officer can do anything."

"There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."

"Every organization should tolerate rebels who tell the emperor he has no clothes."

"If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude."

"Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off."

"Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible."

"The information I presented to the U.N. was vetted by the CIA. Every word came from the CIA. And they stood behind all that information. (From a 2009 interview by Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy )"

"I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world — onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama."

"I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America. I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards — Purple Heart, Bronze Star — showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way."

"I wouldn't characterize it the way Larry has, calling it a cabal... what Larry is suggesting in his comments is that very often maybe Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney would take decisions in to the president that the rest of us weren't aware of. That did happen, on a number of occasions."

"I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground, and scour Iraq from one corner to the other, and find no weapons of mass destruction?"

"Nothing was spun to me... What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us. (Powell told David Frost in a BBC television interview)"

"We want to see both sides not take unilateral action that would prejudice an eventual outcome, a reunification that all parties are seeking."