Harvard University Alumni

"If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time."

"I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches."

"At one point early in his journal Dr. Bannerman describes himself as “a naturalist of the puttering type—I would rather sit on a log then write monographs: it pays off better.”"

"She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking."

"“Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.”"

"After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior."

"They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk."

"“You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?” “Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?” “Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it—that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it—devil-worship—but never will they respect it except superstitiously.”"

"A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves."

"In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it."

"“And where is your guarantee against war in that, Miles?” “There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic—the rest is mechanics.”"

"They never seemed to want to teach her anything except how to be like everybody else. When she finished—bright, you know, nothing stupid about Clara—she could add a column of figures after a fashion, read a little if she had to. Hated books, still does. Always been a heavy reader myself, be lost nowadays if I wasn’t. Damned if I know what she did learn. Self-expression before she could have anything to express. Social consciousness, whatever that is, when even now she hasn’t enough command of language to tell you what she thinks society is. Scraps of this and that, no logic to hold ’em together. Everything made easy—and how are you going to make education easy? You might as well try to build an athlete by keeping him in a hammock with cream puffs and beer."

"Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim."

"Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble."

"Human beings have never been very adult about cleaning up after themselves."

"One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too."

"Patience is a narcotic for the weak."

"I’ve watched human beings fool around with love. Love of self mostly, but also love of place, work, ideas; love of friends, of male and female, parent and child. I can’t think of any human illusions more comic than those of love."

"“I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.” “If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”"

"Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?"

"You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it."

"I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them."

"I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?"

"One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests."

"In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl."

"But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide."

"The academic world as well as mainstream American media gave Benson complete credit for the discovery of the science of meditation. Seldom mentioned was its debt to Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation. In fact, Benson was credited for having ‘demystified meditation’ by removing the mantra that seemed threatening to many Judeo-Christian Americans. He made a fortune and a great career at Harvard selling these techniques acknowledging neither the Indian origin of the practices nor the Sanskrit-based theories and epistemologies that interpreted and explained the higher states of consciousness."

"(Scott Adams About Vivek Ramaswamy): Wouldn't you love to know, if there's an international event [...], that your guy – the guy representing your country – is the smartest one in the room? For once? For once?"

"The central focus of his medical research was to validate, and explain, the effects of ancient Indian systems repackaged as his proprietary Relaxation Response in scientific and technical language. For instance, the deep rest provided by the TM technique is renamed ‘a hypometabolic state of parasympathetic activation’. Given his clout, funding sources, and sponsorship from Christian institutions, such as the John Templeton Foundation (brought in as a board member), he succeeded in rebranding Maharishi’s distinctly Indian ideas as his own Benson Method. He became a significant bridge to bring the bounties of Indian mind sciences into Western frameworks and ownership."

"Benson traveled to India with the intent of adding Tibetan Buddhism ideas on to his own meditation system to make it seem different than TM. In 1980, when Benson and Wallace met in India, Benson pretended he had done no wrong, to the contrary claiming he had contributed to Indian spirituality by popularizing Maharishi’s ideas. Maharishi was asked several times about Benson’s plagiarism; he was aware of it but wanted Wallace and others to ignore it and not pursue the matter officially."

"If folks at home want to watch a bunch of people blindly bash Trump, they can just flip the channel and watch MSNBC right now. But I'm not running for President of MSNBC, I'm running for President of the United States."

"If we're successful, the true mark of success for the U.S. and for Israel would be to get to a 2028 where Israel is so strongly standing on its own two feet, integrated into the economic and security infrastructure of the rest of the Middle East, that it will not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.."

"they spent trillions, killed millions, and made billions for themselves"

"The real election that was stolen was stolen from [Donald Trump] was the 2016 election, which I believe was stolen from him. He wasn't able to govern because of a fraudulent theory created by opposition research, that somehow the FBI bought to get a FISA warrant to stop a man from governing for the first two years as effectively as he might have done. I also believe that the Hunter Biden laptop story, if unsuppressed, the data would suggest it, I think you would agree on these facts if you look at the polling data, would have likely changed the outcome of what was otherwise a very close election. Most Americans did not have access to that story because it was systematically suppressed. If they did have access to it [...], there's strong evidence and polling data to suggest, that would have changed the outcome of the election. I have also said that I have seen no evidence of systematic ballot fraud that would have overturned the result of the 2020 election."

"We fought a civil war in this country to give black Americans the equal protection under the law that we failed to secure them in 1776. But then, you want to know what happened? Southern states passed anti-gun laws that stopped black people from owning guns; the Democrat Party, then as in now, wanted to put them back in chains."

"Bari Weiss: The way that you're talking about the need to restore a national character, I cannot square that with your support of Donald Trump."

"What the MSM calls a “conspiracy theory” is often nothing more than an amalgam of incentives hiding in plain sight. Once you see that, the rest becomes pretty obvious."

"[About 6 January 2020:] I'm not condoning what [Donald Trump] did. What he did was wrong. But the real cause of what happened on January 6 was censorship."

"Corporations never truly loved wokeness, even as they embraced it and married it to capitalism. They always intended to use it. But wokeness never truly loved capitalism, either. There was nothing fundamentally woke about capitalism, no natural compatibility. When corporations started proclaiming that wokeness and capitalism were inseparable and offering money and status to anyone who could help spread that message, each side accepted the proposal not because there was very much truth to it but because it was profitable. […]"

"In exchange, corporations got to wear the protective cloak of wokeness’s moral superiority."

"(Chris Christie): I've heard enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT standing up here."

"Unfortunately, for a short period it became fashionable to read this epic in cultural terms – Aryan vs. Dravidian. This, in my view, is a misreading of the fundamental premise of the epic: the opposition between two views of life, one epitomized by Rama, the other by Ravana. What makes Kamban so great is that he presents both views in extremely convincing and beautiful terms – Ravana is the greatest of all kings and symbolizes this world, Rama symbolizes another dimension. And don't forget, Ravana is a Brahmin."

"Diversity has become a term of art, a symbol, one so powerful that the symbol is now more important than the thing it was supposed to represent. Wokeness sacrifices true diversity, diversity of thought, so that skin-deep symbols of diversity like race and gender can thrive. Just like Christ in the story, true diversity of thought now represents a threat to the Church of Diversity."

"Wokeness is the new orthodoxy, the new religion, one that disguises itself in secular clothing. Because its disciples worship the secular forces of identity rather than any supernatural one, it’s much easier for the Church of Diversity to infiltrate the workplace."

"It’s a system of beliefs that stands as one indivisible unit and touches on all aspects of one’s existence. You aren’t allowed to consider the evidence and pick and choose which parts of wokeness you like. … Like Christianity and Islam, wokeness purports to provide a system of beliefs that explains everything, and it doesn’t allow its believers to pick and choose … … wokeness gives commands, not suggestions. … You’re not allowed to be a little woke, just like Christians can’t follow their five favorite commandments. […] It’s the structure that they use to make sense of the universe. Where a nonwoke person sees ordinary interactions, … a disciple of wokeness sees microaggressions. Just as a Christian sees God’s hand in all of Creation, someone who’s woke sees the guiding hand of identity-based power relations everywhere they look."

"[…] the defining scam of our time – one that robs you of not only your money but your voice and your identity."

"We have no idea what science will look in, say, twenty or thirty years. ... Every scientist has to bet. Science is not a science — it's an art and a gamble."

"Why would there be math that had no physical manifestation?"

"The conditions for spacetime supersymmetry of the heterotic in backgrounds with arbitrary metric, torsion, Yang-Mills and dilaton expectation values are determined using the sigma model approach. The resulting equations are explicitly solved for the torsion and dilaton fields, and the remaining equations cast in a simple form. Previously unnoticed topological obstructions to solving these equations are found. The equations are shown to agree to leading order in perturbation theory with those derived in a field theory approach, provided one considers a more general ansatz than in previous analyses by allowing for a warp factor for the metric. Exact solutions with non-zero torsion are found, indicating a new class of finite sigma models."

"Low-energy effective field theories arising from string compactifications are generically inconsistent or ill-defined at the classical level because of conifold singularities in the moduli space. It is shown, given a plausible assumption on the degenaracies of black hole states, that for type II theories this inconsistency can be cured by nonperturbative quantum effects: the singularities are resolved by the appearance of massless Ramond-Ramond black holes."