Academics From The United States

"A lot of this had to do with resenting the suggestion when I was starting out as a writer that I should write about the Asian American experience and have Asian American characters. I thought the suggestion was, in and of itself, racist, that I was being told I shouldn’t step out of the ethnic literature box, that I should know my place. But I didn’t want to be labeled as an ethnic writer, and I wasn’t interested in writing about being an immigrant or setting stories in Old Asia. I had no connections to those stories. They weren’t my stories. So essentially my reaction to those suggestions was, Fuck you…"

"I have inherited this sense that seriousness does not necessarily go with grief, or seriousness does not necessarily go with joy, which to me is not glee, actually. Joy is this very complex, full, rigorous emotion. But yeah, I think the fact that I felt like I was being a little transgressive by titling it that indicates at least something about the way that I’ve come up in contemporary poetry."

"If you're saying "Well, the general resurrection is coming soon" or "The apocalyptic consummation is coming soon", you can say that all you want because it's in the future and you can't be wrong unless you're stupid enough to date it."

"I’d like to see us get to the point where Asian American authors can have Asian American characters and a big deal isn’t made about it, or at least so it’s not the first thing mentioned…"

"We forget that it was the religion of abolitionists that led them not to pray against slavery but to stand against slavery."

"It doesn’t say rest on your laurels, but to keep on pushing. In this work, sometimes you get heavy criticism. People do say ugly things, ‘You just want money.’ I just want other people to have health care. You know, Jesus healed everybody and never charged a co-pay."

"My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally."

"When faith and church becomes merely a place for privatized religion and privatized salvation and privatized relationship with the divine, it is actually counter to Scripture. Jesus said that nations would be judged for how we treat the poor, the sick, the stranger, the immigrants and the least of these."

"I think it’s one of the major responsibilities of the poet. As poets we tend to not like the word “responsibility”. We prefer “freedom”, we want to be as free as we can, but freedom and responsibility can go together. We’re responsible because we’re writers, and we’ve been at this all our lives…"

"Beauty, suffering, power and culture are all related. We cannot tear away from reality. It is better to live with all things, then to cut ourselves off and fester in a segmented mind."

"Poetry, with the breath of the poet, the heart of her life, joined by millions, pushes forth with the creative forces bestowed upon us. A wall is a plaything before the positive. It will take time. Change comes — rumbling with letters and caesuras, chants, odd-angled rhymes and earthy people power."

"They are standing up and they're crying…and their emotion is coming from all the emotion we're experiencing collectively."

"I believe in beautiful messes…I like to splatter a lot."

"I try to point out to them there's less chance of your becoming just illustrative when you become involved with the plastic elements of painting. So in short this is how I try to adapt it to teaching. You don't see a head as a head, but you see it as a form and as a shape. And you can work as realistically as you care to. But if you just see these things for what they are the chances are you will become more illustrative and you will never develop from this, you know; move out from this…"

"…My early beginnings, as most Negroes in the United States, has been the Negro experience. This is all I knew at one time was the Negro experience. My whole background, Negro family, Negro community, everything was Negro. So I think it was natural that I would use this symbol for my expression, you see…"

"‘The migrants kept coming’ is a refrain of triumph over adversity. If it rings true for you today, then it must still strike a chord in our American experience."

"When the subject is strong, simplicity is the only way to treat it."

"According to , “Professor Mike Mann has been a world leader in scientific efforts to understand the natural variability of the climate system and to reconstruct global temperature variations over the past two millennia. This critically important work led to the famous 'hockey-stick' temperature reconstruction. The hockey stick provides compelling evidence for the emergence of a human-caused warming signal from the background noise of natural fluctuations in climate.”"

"At the other end of the spectrum are stories that it's too late, that it's all over, that there's nothing left to do. Misinterpretations of the data lead some to declare that the Earth itself is going to die or human beings are going to die out in the near future, stories that clash with what the evidence tells us. They make people feel terrible, and they make them passive. Doomism, as climate scientist Michael Mann calls it, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prevents the action that can shift us away from the worst-case scenarios."

"...If we fail to act to bring down our carbon emissions over the next decade, this will lock in disastrous melting of the ice sheets, sea level rise, and a rise in devastating weather extremes down the road. (2019)"

"this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century. But we didn't do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, "There's a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere": the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming."

""There's no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events," climate scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, "including drought, intense hurricanes, and supertyphoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves, and potentially other types of extreme weather though the details are still being debated within the scientific community.'"

"My diction, my choice of words, is as precise as I can make it. The images that I use, the evocation of the senses, again, relies upon a certain exactitude. You can see how what I did with language as a poet would bleed into what I did as a lawyer, vice-versa…"

"Everybody takes his or her reality for granted. Everybody takes for granted the reality we see, we hear. That’s true for life as well as poetry. We grow up in certain circumstances, in a certain environment, and we understand that this is the way the world works. Sometimes we have to unlearn that truth, learn that there is a different or broader reality. I’m always open to that, and I’m certainly transformed any number of times during my life. And then I regress. We all do it…"

"A Puerto Rican writer from New York is doubly dislocated: first, there is dislocation from Puerto Rico; secondly, there is Puerto Rico’s dislocation from itself. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. It may be a truism that you can’t go home again, but it’s especially true when home is an occupied territory. A Puerto Rican writer from New York, like myself, is twice alienated. I never forget that in this country I belong to a marginalized, silenced, even despised community; yet, in Puerto Rico, as a “Nuyorican” poet, I am marginalized again, for reasons related and unrelated to the island’s colonial status…"

"I used to sit on the stairs outside the courtroom and scratch out poems on legal pads while I was waiting for our cases to be called. There were juvenile hearings prior to the housing cases, and of course given their right to privacy we were not allowed inside the courtroom while that was going on. Everyone was in the hallway or on the stairs. I sat there. I didn’t have an office there, and I wrote poems. It was not as crazy as it might sound because whether I was working or am working as a lawyer or a poet, I am an advocate…"

"America, which idealizes the rights of the individual above everything else, is in reality, a nation dominated by the social power of groups, classes, in-groups and cliques—both ethnic and religious. The individual in America has few rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another. Hence, the individual Negro has, proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield. Thus it can be seen that those Negroes, and there are very many of them, who have accepted the full essence of the Great American Ideal of individualism are in serious trouble trying to function in America."

"You have a right to be curious. And I have a right to refuse to satisfy it. You may credit it to your own charm or an old man’s whim, if you like. You are interesting, you know. Hired killers always are. Not admirable, but interesting."

"Yet there was a pattern, and the fact that Horn could find it was a commentary upon empire. Mass government is government by rule and regulation. Obedience and conformity are overriding virtues; initiative is punished more often than rewarded. There are prescribed procedures for conducting a search, and no man can be punished for choosing rules over reality."

"Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion."

"Horn sat in the near darkness staring at eight floating choices and reflected how inevitability had channeled his actions since he had left the Cluster. Since he had accepted the money from the voice in the darkness, there had been only one step to take, and he had taken it; one path to follow, and he had followed it. Beyond, it had seemed, there would be choice; never now. So it had let him on, step by step, comforted by the self-nurtured illusion of free will, guided subtly, unyieldingly, by the iron tube of determinism. Once it started, he never had a chance to turn back."

"Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them."

"“What’s wrong with him, Matal?” Wendre said dazedly. “He wants to kill us all.” “Power,” Wu said somberly, stepping back from the car, “is a vision that drives men mad.”"

"“I go where I wish,” Horn had said, there at the base of the cliff. And the ancient Mr. Wu had replied, “So we think, so we think. In the middle of things we see no pattern. But as we look back and view the picture whole, we realize how men are moved about by forces they do not suspect. The pieces fall into place. The pattern is clear.” In other words, when somebody moves, something has pushed. Choice. Where had there been choice?"

"“Whatever a woman is,” Wendre said, “she’s that second and a woman first.”"

"Creation.… It is its own nemesis. Success is temporary, and idolization will not make the ephemeral permanent. Decay is implicit in the birth of any organism. An empire is an organism."

"“There are the troops and their commanders, the technicians, the laborers, and many other classes. All of them have different desires and different ideas about how to gain them. Multiply this by the number of worlds in the Empire and you have a conflict of interests which can never be reconciled.” “But isn’t that inefficient?” Wendre asked. “It is indeed. But inefficiency is one of the penalties of freedom. You can’t be efficient unless you can force people into channels and make them go where they don’t want to go.”"

"Power is habit-forming. We grew addicted to it. Few things survive the centuries’ slow decay: senses grow dull; passions grow weak; and ideals die. Only the taste for power lives on as an excuse for survival."

"He was a strong man in wise enough to realize that beyond power itself is the power of using it wisely."

"“Magic.” He shot photos and shook his head. “Pure magic, till we learn enough to understand it.”"

"The mystery of it gets me. The builders of the trilithons and the road were high-tech wizards, but their skills didn’t save them. I’ve been wondering how they died. Maybe they got too good at the science of war."

"Civilization.… Like everything else, it has a price. The down payment is freedom. For the privilege of living together, men surrender the right to do as they please; they make laws and restrict themselves within them. When civilization is conferred from outside, the price is even steeper: someone else makes the laws."

"“That’s a cynical viewpoint,” Horn said slowly. “I’m an old man. I can afford no longer the luxury of ideals. If I am to achieve results recognizable within my few remaining years, I must be practical.”"

"The vampire legend, he might conclude, has served conveniently for many thousand years as a conventional folk expression of unconscious feelings of aggression and guilt."

"The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied. Life holds no kindness for such a man. Any defeat short of death is only a spur; success is empty. With cold self-analysis, Horn recognized this fact, accepted it, and went on unchanged."

"“Sure, when something moves, somebody has pushed, but that isn’t good or bad in itself. It depends on the situation and the pusher.” “You’re learning wisdom,” Sair said. “Only the circumstances determine good and evil. And only the future can say what the circumstances actually were.” “Then there is no firm basis for acting at all,” Wendre objected. “What you do for the best of motives may be the worst thing to do.” “Exactly,” Sair said dryly. “It is a commonplace that more harm is done by well-intentioned fools then by the most unscrupulous villains. A wise man learns not to judge. He may set himself certain standards, but he recognizes that they are only a personal pattern to guy his own conduct and that other standards have the same validity.”"

"“I’m not a religious man, Mr. Barbee—I reject the supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell.” The dark man smiled. “For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It’s my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem.”"

"“The only real scientific support of extrasensory and psychokinetic phenomena has come from such studies as those at Duke University,” he added. “Some of the published results purporting to show the reality of ESP and the mental manipulation of probability are pretty convincing—but I’m afraid the wish to demonstrate the survival of the soul has blinded the researchers to some grave flaw in their experimental or statistical methods.” He shook his head, with a sober emphasis. “This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomena that takes place in it—from the birth of suns to the tendency of men to live in fear of gods and devils—was implicit in the primal superatom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The efforts that some distinguished scientists make to find room for operation of a free human will and the creative function of supernatural divinity in such apparent defects of mechanistic determination as Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty—those futile efforts are as pathetic to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All the so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking.” His calm brown face smiled hopefully. “Does that make you feel any better?” “It does, doctor.”"

"“I don’t see the necessity of this mummery—” “Necessity?” Wu said. “Free will is a necessity. And the illusion is more important than the reality.”"

"He certainly didn’t feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever?"