Academics From The United States

"There are still many open questions that need answering: Why does gravity defy the notion of space-time in short distances? Why are there humongous quantum fluctuations in shorter distances? How is a larger Universe possible? These questions relate to the hierarchy problem and fine tuning and are divided into two stages. First, one should ask: “Why is there a macroscopic Universe that is not broken in the Planck scale,” and second: “Why are there large scale structures in the large Universe and they are not broken into Planck scale black holes?”"

"... for almost as long as people have been anticipating ... thinking about , the prime candidate for new physics, beyond the , ... has been supersymmetry."

"Two of the major questions left unanswered by the Standard Model of particle physics have to do with hierarchies of mass scales. The first is the problem: what determines the masses of the s and s, and why do they span such a large range, e.g. why is the top quark 3 × 105 times heavier than the electron? The second is the gauge hierarchy problem: why is the weak scale seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than the ?"

"... nature has very few good ideas — it recycles them in subtle and interesting ways, over and over again — and it's our job to understand how that works."

"... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics."

"Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way."

"This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology."

"The stakes are higher than the past. We aren’t asking about this or that particle, but something much more deeply structural about physical reality. … By far the best way to settle this question is to lead a charge to the highest possible energies and build a 100-TeV collider."

"The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem."

"I'd like to live in a world in which happily married gay people have closets full of assault weapons to protect their pot."

"[W]e have, in many ways, the worst political class in our country's history."

"The United States started out in 1776 throwing off the accident and force that ruled by hereditary right in the old world, inviting mankind to respect the equal rights of human nature and the revolutionary choice of government by consent."

"It is never easy to give honor where great honor is due."

"[T]he United States of America, is not only the most powerful and the most prosperous country on earth, but the most free and the most just. Then I do my best to tell them how and why this is so. And I teach them about the principles from which those blessings of liberty flow. I invite them to consider whether they can have any greater honor than to pass undiminished to their children and grandchildren this great inheritance of freedom."

"I'm in the ironic position of teaching native Americans (I mean native-born Americans) how to think about their country. How odd it seems, and yet how perfectly American, that I, a Hungarian immigrant, should teach them."

"America represented to my father, as Lincoln put it, "the last, best hope of earth." I would like to be able to say that this made my father a remarkable man for his time and his circumstances. For, in many ways, he truly was a wonder. But this is not one of those ways. Among the Hungarians I knew—aside from those who were true believers in the Communists—this was the common sense of the subject. It was self-evident to them."

"[I]n America human beings could prove to the world that they have the capacity to govern themselves. I came to understand what Lincoln meant when he said that the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were the "electric cord" that linked all Americans together, as though we were "blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration." This is what it meant to be an American, and it wasn't all that far from what it meant to be a man."

"Communists sentenced my father's father to ten years hard labor for having a small American flag in his possession (by that time he had been a leader of the social democrats for some years). At his "trial" he was asked why he had the flag. Was he a spy? He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew, and that he had a right to have it."

"Think of the press as a psychological warfare operation aimed at normal Americans and you won’t go far wrong."

"Given the failure of the two party establishments, it’s not entirely surprising that young people are looking elsewhere. Their votes are up for grabs, for those who are willing and able to offer something different. For the sake of the country, let’s hope those votes are won by people who are able to offer something different, and constructive, at the same time."

"Want real socialism? Look at Venezuela, an oil-exporting nation that is now dead broke even as the family of its socialist dictator, Hugo Chavez, reportedly somehow inherited billions at his death in 2013. Redistribution of wealth often seems to involve redistributing most of it to the people on top of the socialist pyramid."

"[T]he history of the 20th century was basically that of the swath of destruction left across the globe by socialist ideas, from the international socialism of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union to the national socialism of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party."

"[S]ocialism does have a siren call — essentially, the promise that if you vote for socialists, they’ll take stuff away from other people and give it to you. Since many people would rather have free stuff given to them in the name of “fairness” than have to work to get their own stuff, it’s never hard to round up votes with that approach. As the saying goes, a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can count on getting Paul’s vote."

"A socialist is someone who wants politicians to decide who gets what; a "democratic socialist" wants the politicians to at least stand for election first."

"[D]rivers who feel their lives are in danger from a violent mob should not stop their vehicles. I remember Reginald Denny, a truck driver who was beaten nearly to death by a mob during the 1992 Los Angeles riots... I have always supported peaceful protests, speaking out against police militarization and excessive police violence."

"[R]iots aren't peaceful protest. And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest — it's threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn't actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn't stop because I'd fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would."

"[B]lacks definitely were part of "we the people" who made the Constitution of 1787."

"Blacks got federal passports implying that they were citizens... The Articles of Confederation stated that "the free inhabitants of these states... shall be entitled to all privileges of immunities of free citizens in the several states", Congress voted down South Carolina's proposal to insert the word "white" into this clause."

"The growing openness to members of all the world's races was always possible under the terms of the Declaration of Independence, which, as Lincoln noted, made a transracial principle, the equal natural rights of all men, the basis of citizenship. For that reason, America from the beginning was always a multinational and multiracial society. As early as 1776, as we saw in the first chapter, some blacks were citizens, as were many non-British Europeans."

"When the decision was finally made to accept blacks as full citizens, the founders' principles provided the theoretical foundation. Lincoln's revival of the declaration in the 1850s had prepared the way. In principle, people of all races can become citizens of a nation based on the idea that "all men are created equal"."

"What defines a people is not race, not tradition, not geography, but the free choice of a group of human beings to live together as fellow citizens."

"Most of the Constitution's Framers knew, and many said, that slavery was wrong."

"[N]either the Civil War nor Reconstruction fit neatly into traditional Marxist frameworks. Both the Civil War and Reconstruction belong to a chapter in American history in which the United States was still an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, and the contest that was waged between 1861 and 1865 was largely an argument (in economic terms) between the free-labor family farm and the slave-labor cotton plantation."

"It was once said, as a commercial joke, that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The same is true in this case, but not as a joke: It’s not nice to fool with history."

"[A]s Americans, our identity does not rest on race, religion, blood, or soil, but on a historical proposition, that all men are created equal. Take that away, render it vain, illusory, or nugatory, and we lose all identity as Americans. And then what remains for us? The great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the first step a tyrant takes toward enslaving a people is to steal their history, for in that case, no one has anything from the past with which to compare the present, and any horror can be normalized."

"The anti-free-speech fanatics on campuses and throughout the country have raised their hand against the idea that guarantees us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"We are not talking here about mere bad frat-boy behavior or professorial eccentricity but about orchestrated campaigns to assault the fundamental liberties of the American republic, tolerated by campus administrators who, in equal measure, fear confrontations with student activists as a threat to their career advancement, and hope that no news of their cravenness leaks out to the press and the alumni."

"Reverence for free speech is deeply embedded in American life, but speech cannot be protected unless those who acknowledge its value set aside their partisan differences for a moment and trust one another enough to say that the outrages against free speech must end."

"[T]he wall of separation between public and private higher education has been eroding for the last half-century. Funding from public sources now constitutes the bulk of higher-education resources in the United States, whether in the form of government subventions for research and programs, or in the much vaster influx of government-guaranteed student loans. For all realistic purposes, the distinction between public and private higher education has ceased to exist. Further, the vast numbers of young American adults being drawn in to the college and university system (some 20.4 million, up by 25 percent from 2000 alone)—on the assumption that college degrees are virtually a sine qua non of entrance into profitable commerce or lucrative professions—has evaporated what little is left of the pretense that academe constitutes some monastic realm, beyond the orbit of civil society."

"The real crime of white supremacy was not that it put up statues, or even that it made speeches, but that it attacked citizens and passed laws."

"Culture made the use of the F-bomb on television unthinkable in 1965; 40 years later, HBO would be lost without it."

"There has never been a freedom, of course, that someone has not proved ingenious enough to abuse."

"[D]o not expect Americans to believe that freedom of speech is some disguised puppetry of the powerful. It is, to the contrary, an indispensable ingredient in the recipe for preventing tyrannies, be they of the left or right, be they in the name of the Fatherland, the Volk, or the workers. To say otherwise is merely to perform what Michael Polanyi called a “moral inversion”—an intellectual juggling act in which we are asked, in Orwellian terms, to regard freedom as slavery, discrimination as nondiscrimination, and truth as power."

"[T]he genuinely oppressed—as opposed to the hustlers of faux outrage—have always known freedom of speech to be their best friend."

"Today’s despisers of free speech have their roots in a different ideology from the tribal sort that was used to justify slaveholding and Puritanism. This newer ideology began with Karl Marx—or rather, with the struggle of Marxist intellectuals to explain the failure of the European proletariat to rise in violent revolution at the outbreak of World War I. Rather than joining in solidarity with the working classes of other nations, European workers rallied in dismaying numbers to their national flags, exhausted themselves in a four-year killing spree that beggared all previous descriptions of war, and then succumbed to waves of populist fascism. The only revolution that Marxists could tease out of the charnel house of the Great War was a coup d’état in the most backward and least industrially developed empire of Europe and, even then, only by the substitution of what Vladimir Lenin called a “vanguard” of Marxist elites rather than a spontaneous uprising of the workers."

"[[Confederate States of America|[T]he Calhounite Confederacy]], despite its Lost Cause apologists and their determination to apotheosize the Confederacy as "conservative", has nothing that binds it to a genuinely republican conservatism. The Confederacy was what William Russell Howard called "a modern Sparta", not a democratic Athens, much less a republican Rome."

"[T]he defeat of the Confederacy did not necessarily mean the end of oligarchy. Despite the destructiveness of the war, Southern land tenures remained largely undisturbed, and in the Reconstruction years, the sadder-but-wiser oligarchs learned how, once again, to play on the racial hatreds they had spent decades so sedulously cultivating among the white yeomanry."

"The cotton nabobs had made the South a no-go area for the Constitution..."

"Trying to plant such an oligarchy in the midst of what was otherwise the world's most successful republican regime was no small task, and it required the invention of ideological monstrosities to justify it. In the Southern case, the monstrosities included race-based rationales for the enslavement of Africans."

"Where a republic demands equality, and equality tends to ensure mobility, oligarchy is about hierarchy and stasis."