Columbia University Alumni

"I felt ashamed, because we’re not supposed to, and there’s something unprofessional about it."

"Telling Lorne was really hard."

"This is fresh. It only happened two months ago."

"The most meaningful moments were moments when, like on a Friday night at rehearsal, I decided to stop and look around at the people who I loved so much and just make a memory of it. Nothing special — we were all just sitting around, and Mikey [Day] was doing a bit or Alex [Moffat] was doing a bit, and we were catching up and just looking around at the crew. Those are the moments that meant the most."

"[T]he word empire is a fraught one... [E]mpire is... a form of global governance in which a dominant power exercises control over the destiny of others, either... direct... rule (colonies) or indirect influence (military, economic and cultural). Empire, bloc, commonwealth, or world order... all express... power that has persisted for... four thousand years... [E]mpires are an undeniable, unchanging fact of human history. After counting seventy... Niall Fergusson noted.., "To those who would still insist on American 'exceptionalism', the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all other sixty-nine empires.""

"Having seized... and Imperial Japan in 1945, the United States would rely for... seventy years on... thickening military power to contain... China and Russia... enjoying... unimpeded access to trade and resources of five continents... building a global dominion of... wealth and power. The current... conflict between Beijing and Washington is... the latest round in a centuries long struggle for control... Spain versus the Ottomans, Britain versus Russia... the United State versus the Third Reich and then the Soviet Union."

"[F]amily and school taught me that criticism was not only a right but a responsibility of citizenship."

"Nor did the French colonists have any illusions about how they were financing Indochina's development. When the government announced plans to build a railway up the Red River valley into China's Yunnan Province, a spokesman for the business community explained one of its primary goals: "It is particularly interesting, at the moment one is about to vote funds for the construction of a railway to Yunnan, to search for ways to augment the commerce between the province and our territory.... The regulation of commerce in opium and salt in Yunnan might be adjusted in such a way as to facilitate commerce and increase the tonnage carried on our railway.""

"It has taken many years of education and much of my life to gain some insight into the geopolitical dynamics that propelled the United States to global hegemony and are... condemning it to decline."

"This... US imperium was Athenian in its ability to forge coalitions..; Roman in its reliance on... military bases across... the... world; and British in... aspiration to merge culture, commerce, and alliances into a comprehensive system... [A]... quest for ... lent it a distinctive dimension."

"Washington... faces an adversary with... the means and determination to mount a sustained challenge... Even if Beijing falters, thanks to a decline in economic growth or... surge in popular discontent, there are a dozen rising powers working to build a multipolar world beyond the grasp of any global hegemon."

"There is no “radical relativism” plaguing modern knowledge fields, and certainly none plaguing atheists or physicalists or scientists—we are to a clear super-plurality all realists, not relativists, regarding knowledge of ourselves and the world. And secular science has provided extensive justifications for belief in the reliability of the human mind—to the extent that it actually is reliable. Remember, without those installed software fixes, of formal logics and mathematics and critical thinking and the scientific method, it’s actually pretty un-reliable. So there is no reason to believe that any of this comes from God—to the contrary, that inborn human reasoning is so terrible proves it cannot come from God. … God would want to send us that software fix! So the fact that no book purported to be God’s communications contains that crucial information means no such book actually contains God’s communications."

"As far as women go, there's a lot more we still need to do."

"The vulnerability of young women is very much tied into gender power differences in society."

"For most of my life I thought about science and its application to leaving people better off, so I wanted to be a scientist and do something that would help people."

"Women continue to inspire me to persist with my scientific endeavors. While some progress has been made, much more remains to be done to ensure a non-sexist and just society."

"When we come together with unity of purpose, we can achieve great things."

"When solutions are not shared fairly or equitably, the pathogen thrives, as we witnessed during COVID-19, and another example where sharing information openly as South African scientists did during the emergence of the Omicron variant resulted in a travel ban by several countries in the Global North for the entire southern African region."

"We can’t think of problems in the global south as just problems for the global south."

"We focused on developing and testing technologies that empowered women."

"We have to balance mission-oriented investments with curiosity investments, because the discoveries from curiosity research enable the innovation for mission-driven science. Undertaking biomedical research is high-risk, and more often than not does not produce the desired outcomes. However, we learn and understand the phenomenon better and move forward incrementally. This persistence and perseverance is a hallmark of scientific endeavours together with vigorous debates and discussions of findings."

"And it’s not a token affirmative action process, but creating the space for women’s voices to be heard, women to contribute in the context of complex challenges that face us is no longer a luxury – we need all voices heard and opportunities created for all to contribute."

"Environments can be created where women feel they belong, and we can see from the 20 years of CAPRISA’s existence how creating a supportive space for women has enabled a lot of women to thrive, to make their contributions and be constantly making cutting-edge contributions. So this is a concrete example. It’s not just rhetoric; it's not idealism that we can make it happen, and we need to illustrate that more and more because that means inclusivity at all levels, which bodes well for human security and planetary health."

"I think I always had a performer somewhere inside of me, even though, believe it or not, I was quite shy in high school and before that I had a very shy side that I didn’t really shed until my first year at Columbia University. Like much of my freshman class, I thought at the time that I was going to go work on Wall Street. That’s what I wanted to do. I figured I’d wear a power suit, carry a briefcase and trade and yell and buy low and sell high. I always say, though, that no matter what career I chose, I think I would have been happy because I’m a happy person and I’d want to choose something that I enjoy doing. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I’m in the position that I’m in now because I do love what I do, but it was something that wasn’t really a part of my life until I moved to New York and was at school."

"How do we interact with life delicately? Because we're entering a new age of exploration, where we have to take great care, and we have to set examples how we explore. So I've teamed up with roboticist Rob Wood at Harvard University, and we've been designing squishy underwater robot fingers, so we can delicately interact with the marine life down there. The idea is that most of our technologies to explore the deep ocean come from oil and gas and military, who, you know, they're not really caring to be gentle."

"This is the front line against terrible organisms. Like terrorism, you can’t fight it just within our borders. You’ve got to fight epidemic diseases where they emerge. [...] Either we help or hope we get lucky it isn’t an epidemic that travelers will catch or spread to our country."

"There are side effects to hydroxychloroquine. It causes psychiatric symptoms, cardiac problems and a host of other bad side effects. [...] There may be a role for it for some people, but to tell Americans ‘you don’t have anything to lose,’ that’s not true. People certainly have something to lose by taking it indiscriminately."

"He was a leader within the emergency room field. ... Unless our government steps up & gets us the protective equipment we need, he will be the first of many of my colleagues."

"I have no doubt that ESP is a non-local ability independent of space and time. What that means is that we misapprehend the nature of the spacetime we’re living in."

"Very hard for a skeptic to say that didn’t happen if the president is saying these guys in California found the airplane. We did many things like that."

"The CIA came to us one day and said 'we would like information about what's going to happen at some coordinates... next Thursday.' This was on a Monday...they wanted us to look 3 days into the future and describe what's happening... Swann said... this looks like a big pyrotechnics display... like the fourth of July, big hemispherical display of fireworks with beautiful color traces up in the air and a bunch of trucks in the far distance...[then] The CIA could see from what he had drawn and from what they had... into the future...The CIA knew the Chinese were planning an atomic bomb test and from what Swann had drawn, that they would carry out the test and that it would fail."

"In response to the question "One of the recurring themes in the book [Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis] is the fact that too few doctors sit down and hear out the patient's story. Why is that?""

"It's hard to listen to a story that's not told well. That's a terrible thing to say, but we all feel this. You know, when we're at the dinner table and Uncle Dave is telling a long, windy story, what you're really thinking is, "Where is this going? What is the bottom line?" That kind of impatience is not just limited to the dinner table; that's often how doctors feel. When you didn't have any other [diagnostic] tools except that story, you just buckled down and listened. But now that we have other [high-tech] tools, we feel like, "O.K., I'm out of here.""

"The way ahead is clear. We must repudiate the false promise of the Bush-Cheney energy plan and select the path of autonomy, self-restraint, and innovation. If we strengthen our resolve, accept a degree of self-discipline, and embrace the new technologies, we will escape the trap of dependency and establish a secure, sustainable, and responsible energy system; if we fail to do these things, we will condemn ourselves to rising bloodshed abroad and hardship at home. The choice is ours. The time of decision is now. It is not too late to abandon our allegiance to oil at any cost and embark on a new energy path. but it might soon be."

"Rather, the administration adopted a series of policies that together formed a blueprint for political, economic and military action in the Gulf. This approach—I call it the strategy of maxim extraction—was aimed primarily at boosting the oil output of the major Gulf producers. but since the sought-after increases could be doomed by instability and conflict in the region, the strategy also entailed increased military intervention."

"Make America Think Harder (MATH)"

"Not Left, Not Right, Forward."

"All Bowser players are carried."

"The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math."

"I'm very proud of my son and anyone who has someone on the spectrum in their family feels the exact same way."

"There are millions of women across the country who are stuck in exploitative or abusive jobs or relationships that would be improved simply by putting $1,000 a month in their hands."

"If you're an anti-Semite, white supremacist or on a sex offender registry, you're ineligible for the Freedom Dividend."

"The United States should provide an annual income of $12,000 for each American aged 18–64, with the amount indexed to increase with inflation. It would require a constitutional supermajority to modify or amend. ... The poverty line is currently $11,770. We would essentially be bringing all Americans to the poverty line and alleviate gross poverty."

"Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country. Much of this is low birth rates and white men dying from substance abuse and suicide. Our life expectancy has declined for 3 years. We need to do much more."

"Entrepreneur Andrew Yang promises to "bring our military spending under control," to "make it harder for the U.S. to get involved in foreign engagements with no clear goal," and to "reinvest in diplomacy." He believes that much of the military budget "is focused on defending against threats from decades ago as opposed to the threats of 2020." But he defines all these problems in terms of foreign "threats" and U.S. military responses to them, failing to recognize that U.S. militarism is itself a serious threat..."

"I support the freedom of parents to adopt circumcision for any religious or cultural ritual as desired. Actually have attended a brit milah myself and felt privileged to be there. Thanks Mikael. Always up to parents."

"While I have told about my successes, did I make mistakes? [I made] more than enough; many mistakes that I bitterly regret. First of all, my mistake was the court."

"I am Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgia did not have a criminal president [talks about himself]. I want every Georgian to know this. The founder of the Georgian state could not have been a criminal, because criminals do not establish states, they instead destroy them and you are [now] witnessing a classic example of that, as Georgia has fallen into the hands of bandits."

"I do not recognise the Prosecutor’s Office and the Georgian judiciary, I am not here to be part of a pre-written comedy (before adress)"

"Of course, I was in a hurry to develop Georgia and anyone who is in a rush makes mistakes. I knew that we had little time, I know that many things needed to be done. But I was speaking with my doctor, who was able to arrive from a village and enroll in the medical university, only because there were national exams. Otherwise, there were no chances to enroll, and when they were coming [to Tbilisi in the past] people used to question them if they knew how much [the bribe for] enrolling would cost. [My doctor] arrived, believed in me and enrolled. The program of American teachers – many of the young generation can speak English, because we used to bring over 2,500 teachers a year. Not only my or Bidzina Ivanishvili’s son were able to study, but any Georgian, from Lesichini village to Khulo and Zemo and Kveda Machkhaani. This was my concept."