Members Of The American Philosophical Society

"Gimbutas, following most recent Russian work, has departed from Childe, to the extent of deriving the Kurgan cultures from the steppes on the Lower Volga and farther east (…) While linguistic opinion has been moving in the direction of putting the Indo-European homeland in the region of the Vistula, Oder or Elbe, archaeological opinion is now putting it in the Lower Volga steppe and regions east of the Caspian Sea."

"My mother's kiss made me a painter."

"Ages are not taken at their own valuation by posterity, and the achievements which they view with most complacency often appear to their successors negligible or even ridiculous. It was so in Greece. Aeschylus expected to be remembered not as a poet, but as a combatant at . speaks as if the greatness of Athens lay in its empire. Much of which it is proud is forgotten by its successors. Much of which it is proud is forgotten by its successors. Whole epochs which were well satisfied with themselves are found in the sequel to matter nothing to the world, and to have made no contribution to its progress. Two hundred years hence our own age may be regarded as one that possessed, for its time, considerable material civilization but very little else, a substantial body and a soul which died from fatty degeneration,"

"A man walking down from to passes the . If it is the evening, a dramatic performance is probably taking place inside. It may be a tragedy, or some form of comedy. If it is a musical comedy and he enters, he will see elaborate scenery and a play which may open with a prologue and which is partly composed of dialogue between the various characters, partly of songs in various sung by a chorus to the accompaniment of an orchestra. As the words in italics indicate, our imaginary passer-by will have seen, though he may not have suspected it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but he would be looking at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home."

"has nearly four million square miles ; has 1,700 ; has 700. Yet this tiny country has given us an art which we, with it and all that the world has done since it for our models, have equalled perhaps, but not surpassed. It has given us the staple of our vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge. Politics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history—these are all Greek words. It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her culture thence. Young Romans completed their education in the Greek schools. Roman orators learnt their trade from Greek rhetoricians. Roman proconsuls on their way to the East stopped to spend a few days talking to the successors of Plato and Aristotle in the and . Roman aristocrats imported Greek philosophers to live in their families."

"They [female primates] tolerate other breeding females if food is plentiful, but chase them away when monogamy is the optimal strategy."

"was a resident of , and was greatly interested in the so-called of that city. The Institute had founded a museum that contained large collections in natural history brought home through the years by the famous Salem ships. Putnam induced his fellow students, , , , and to work at these collections, Morse on the shells, Packard on the , Hyatt on the s and on geology, and Putnam on the vertebrates and ethnology. Whether they went to Salem to live a year or so earlier or later, makes little difference, but, when gave the Institute $140,000 and the well known was founded in 1867, all of them but Verrill (who had gone to , were placed in definite charge of these subjects in the Museum."

"For many centuries humanity has endured the annoyance of mosquitoes without making any intelligent effort to prevent it except in the use of smudges, preparations applied to the skin, and in removal from localities of abundance. And it is only within comparatively recent years that widespread community work against mosquitoes has been undertaken, this having resulted almost directly from the discoveries concerning the carriage of disease by these insects. As obvious a procedure as it might seem to be, the abolition of mosquito-breeding places is a comparatively new idea. The treatment of breeding places with oil to destroy the larval forms is, however, by no means recent. As early as 1812 the writer of a work published in London entitled "Omniana or Horæ Otiosiores" suggested that by pouring oil upon water the number of mosquitoes may be diminished. It is stated that in the middle of the nineteenth century was used in France in this way, while in the French quarter in oil was placed in water tanks before the , the idea having possibly come France to New Orleans or vice versa."

"As is well known, the mosquito-pest is by no means confined to the tropics or even to temperate regions. The stories which the from and other Alaskan localities tell of the abundance and ferocity of Alaskan mosquitoes, are hardly to be matched by any mosquito story which I have heard, historical or otherwise. Many of my friends in the and the who have formed members of summer parties for survey work in Alaska, have come back to this country with a much stronger idea of the importance of the practical study of insects than they had when they started, their acquaintance with mosquitoes having become so intimate and their knowledge of their ferocity having reached such a pitch that the first question which they ask on returning is: "If I have to go up there next summer, what under the sun can I do to keep from being bled to death by mosquitoes?" They state that they never experienced or even imagined anything in the mosquito line quite equal to those found in Alaska. Mr. W. C. Henderson, of Philadelphia, says, concerning Alaskan mosquitoes, "They existed in countless millions, driving us to the verge of suicide or insanity.""

"In 1895 the writer became interested in the study of the . Breeding-cage experiments with some detail later on in this paper early convinced him that is the favorite food of this species. Even in the presence of kitchen garbage, , and , flies in confinement oviposited exclusively on horse manure. In the absence of the latter substance but in the presence of the others, he noted egg-laying on decaying fruit and on cow dung but the resultant larvæ failed to develop. He considered himself warranted in the statement that probably 95 percent of the flies found in cities come from the piles of horse manure everywhere so prevalent, especially in the vicinity of stables."

"There is no doubt for me that making anthropology enter the public sphere and participate in democratic conversations is desirable and even crucial, especially in the hard times contemporary societies are experiencing. To be clear in this respect, I consider that the threat that they face comes less from crime, terrorist attacks, the influx of refugees and migrants, or other real issues to which they are confronted and which I certainly do not want to lessen, than from the responses they offer to these issues as they are dictated by both fear and the political exploitation of fear – which serve to justify the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States, the oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the persecution of Shias in Saudi Arabia, the pogroms against Zimbabweans in South Africa, the repression of Muslim minorities in East Asia, or the rejection of migrants and refugees in Europe – Sweden being, along with Germany, a notable exception to this disgraceful trend of recent years. “A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear,” wrote Clifford Geertz, whom I had the honour to succeed at the Institute for Advanced Study. The aphorism is especially relevant if we substitute “fear” with “politics of fear” – although to destroy it unreasonably exceeds the anthropologists’ power."

"Having earlier conducted some research on mental health issues, I was solicited in 2008 by the health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, to chair the national committee on suicide, but having observed how academics had served as “spoils of war” – the term in use – by the right-wing government of the time to legitimize its policies, I politely declined the proposal."

"Indeed, self-censorship is probably more common than censorship, at least in democratic contexts."

"Speaking truth to power, as the motto goes – whether this power is academic or political – may be a perilous exercise."

"The world as we know it could be different and may therefore be changed."

"Commentators, when they exist, whether on paper, on waves, or increasingly online, are not representative or even indicative of the public, although they can be influential."

"A government above the law is a menace to be defeated."

"The people as a source of sovereign power are in truth only occasional partners in the constitutional minuet danced for most of the time by Parliament and the political party in power."

"As far back as the 3rd or 4th millennium B.C. and probably much earlier still, India was in possession of a highly developed civilization with large and populous cities."

"However, the seed of the debate on the differential population growth rates of the Hindus and Muslims was planted in the undivided India itself. Kingsley Davis, an eminent demographer, was one of the first to raise a debate on the Hindu-Muslim population growth rates in the sub- continent. In his famous book “The Population of India and Pakistan” (1951), he presented before the world the fact that Muslim fertility was higher than the Hindu fertility. For instance, the decline in the proportion of the Hindus from 75.1 per cent to 72.9 per cent in between the censuses of 1881 and 1901 (Davis, 1951) created strong reaction and fear among the Hindus that the Muslims would become the majority population in India in the future. Numerous research and review studies have been done on this area since then. But there seems to be no end to this highly debated topic and it still remains a very popular area for research studies among the research scholars and population scientists."

"In six decades (1881-1941)… at no census have the Muslims failed to improve their percentage and the Hindus failed to lose…” [It is due not only to the] “proportion of Muslim women married, but those who are married also have a higher fertility.”"

"Although there were mass conversions, the country was too vast, the invaders too few, and the volume of immigration too small to change the social complex… India, therefore, never became a Muslim nation, but remained simply a Hindu country in which Muslims were numerous."

"So putting the evidence from archaeology, literature, and history together, we reach the conclusion that before the Christian era India had a substantial population, first because of its advanced technology and second because of the fertile environment of the application of this technology."

"So in India some three to seven thousand years ago there were peoples possessing a technology sufficiently advanced to support a dense population."

"As it happened, such considerations played a decisive role and the eminent linguist M. Emeneau wrote (1954: 282): “At some time in the second millennium BC a band or bands of speakers of an Indo-European language, later to be called Sanskrit, entered India over the north-west passes. This is our linguistic doctrine which has been held now for more than a century and a half. There seems to be no reason to distrust the arguments for it...”"

"It appears relevant to the general subject of this study, and also otherwise worth our while, to inspect more closely the varieties of royal duplications which Shakespeare has unfolded in the three bewildering central scenes of Richard II. The duplications, all one, and all simultaneously active, in Richard — "Thus play I in one person many people" (V. v.31) — are those potentially present in the King, the Fool, and the God. They dissolve, perforce, in the Mirror. Those three prototypes of "twin-birth" intersect and overlap and interfere with each other continuously."

"In other words, whenever we capitalize a notion and, in the English language, even change the gender from neuter to feminine, we actually are "haloing" the word or the notion and are indicating its sempiternity as an idea or power."

"In late antique art, we often find the halo bestowed on such figures as might impersonate a supra-individual idea or general notion. This special mark of distinction indicated that the figure was meant to represent in every respect a continuum, something permanent and sempiternal beyond the contingencies of time and corruption."

"A hundred years or more of Christ-centered monastic piety have affected also the image of rulership. In fact, the unique Reichenau miniature is the most powerful pictorial display of what may be called "liturgical kingship" — a kingship centered in the God-man rather than in God the Father. As a result, the Reichenau artist ventured to transfer the Ottonian emperor also the God-man's "two natures in one person."

"The features as reflected by the looking-glass betray that he is stripped of every possibility of a second or super-body — of the pompous body politic of king, of the God-likeness of the Lord's deputy elect, of the follies of the fool, and even of the most human griefs residing in inner man. The splintering mirror means, or is, the breaking part of any possible duality. All those facets are reduced to one: to the banal face and insignificant physis of a miserable man, a physis now void of any metaphysis whatsoever. It is both less and more than Death. It is the demise of Richard and the rise of a new body natural."

"The fascination emanating as usual from the historical material itself prevailed over any desire of practical or moral application and, needless to say, preceded any afterthought."

"Over against his lost outward kingship he sets an inner kingship, makes his true kingship to retire to inner man, to soul and mind and "regal thoughts": You may my glories and my state depose, But not my briefs, still am I king of those. (IV.i.192ff)"

"The jurists had claimed that the king's body politic is utterly void of "natural Defects and Imbecilities." Here, however, "Imbecility" seems to hold sway. And yet, the very bottom has not been reached. Each scene, progressively, designates a new low. "King body natural" in the first scene, and "Kingly Fool" in the second: with those two twin-born beings there is associated, in the half-sacramental abdication scene, the twin-born deity as an even lower estate. For the "Fool" marks the transition from "King" to "God," and nothing could be more miserable, it seems, than the God in the wretchedness of man."

"The antithesis served the Anonymous, it is true, to observe very strictly the inherent difference between the God and the king; but it served him also to blur that line of distinction and to show where the difference between "God by nature" and "god by grace" ended; that is, in the case of potestas, of power. Essence and substance of power are claimed to be equal in both God and king, no matter whether that power be owned by nature or only acquired by grace."

"That the phrase actually originated in the Hispana is obvious for a simple reason: only in that collection do we find a textual corruption of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon at which one of the bishops modestly said that God imperatorem erexit ad zelum [i.e. fidei]. In other words, a scribe copying the canons of Chalcedon misread the text and changed ad zelum into ad celum; and this erroneous reading must have reached, perhaps through the channels of Pseudo-Isidorus, the Norman Anonymous for whom even that great forgery in favor of the hierarchy could turn into grist brought to his royalist mill. This reading is merely an error, though an error remarkable by itself, since it shows how easily any extravagant exaltation of the imperial power could flow from the pen of a scribe in those centuries."

"The above remarks about conservatism could be made with equal or even greater force about the Mogul Empire. Despite the sheer size of the kingdom at its height and the military genius of some of its emperors, despite the brilliance of its courts and the craftsmanship of its luxury products, despite even a sophisticated banking and credit network, the system was weak at its core. A conquering Muslim elite lay on top of a vast mass of poverty-stricken peasants chiefly adhering to Hinduism. In the towns themselves there were very considerable numbers of merchants, bustling markets, and an attitude towards manufacture, trade, and credit among Hindu business families which would make them excellent examples of Weber's Protestant ethic. As against this picture of an entrepreneurial society just ready for economic "takeoff" before it was a victim of British imperialism, there are the gloomier portrayals of the many indigenous retarding factors in Indian life. The sheer rigidity of Hindu religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amounts of foodstuffs were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions, a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the caste system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and restricted the market; and the influence wielded over Indian local rulers by the Brahman priests meant that this obscurantism was effective at the highest level. Here were the social checks of the deepest sort to any attempts at radical change. Small wonder that later many Britons, having first plundered and then tried to govern India in accordance with Utilitarian principles, finally left with the feeling that the country was still a mystery to them."

"As each great power has risen in the ranks, boosted by its expanding material base, it has tended to devote more and more of its resources to military protection – to guard its interests, to deter (or defeat) jealous rivals. Affording that protection is not such a great problem when the home economy is growing swiftly; when, however, the nation concerned becomes "mature" and its growth rates slow down, it becomes ever more difficult to maintain its extensive military and strategic obligations in the face of newer, faster-growing challengers. The faltering great power thus runs the risk of what I have termed "imperial overstretch", a widening gap between its global interests and obligations and its own capacity to defend them all."

"Military power is sustained, in the final result, by economic power. If the latter crumbles, so eventually will the former."

"Imperial overstretch has rarely occurred because a great power had too little military force; on the contrary, it was likely still to possess massive forces and at times to deploy them a long way from home. The real problem, it seems, has not been the force-projection capacities of the current number one, but a failure to recognise that long-term wealth and strength depend on the non-military dimensions of national power and on making hard political decisions on the home front."

"The emperors, kings, prime ministers and presidents of great powers have always preferred the heady world of diplomacy, war and international affairs to the unglamorous realm of fiscal reform, educational change and domestic renewal. That is understandable, since they will go down in history as leaders of this or that spectacular demonstration of the country's still-powerful military capacity. It is left to later generations to pay the price."

"The Enterprise is a vessel that defies the landlubber's imagination. It is more than 1,100ft long and its flight deck is 250ft across. It is as high as a 20-storey building... But this super-dreadnought never travels alone. It is always accompanied, at the very least, by an Aegis-type cruiser, a large surface ship designed to shoot down incoming missiles; by a bevy of frigates and destroyers to protect it from enemy submarines; by a lurking hunter-killer submarine or two; and by some supply vessels and other specialised craft. Marine troops and their helicopters will be in the task force. In offensive and defensive terms, this is a behemoth... What is more, no equivalent concentration of power to a US carrier task force exists in the world; the few UK, French and Indian carriers are minuscule by comparison, the Russian ones rusting away."

"The US possesses 12 such carriers (another, the USS Ronald Reagan, is to join the fleet soon), each with the attendant group of complementary warships. There are also smaller carriers designed, not for open-ocean combat against all, but to take powerful Marine Corps battalions ashore. This array of force is staggering. Were it ever assembled en masse the result would be the largest concentration of naval and aerial force the world would have seen."

"Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years that I compiled in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and no other nation comes close. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap, Britain's army was much smaller than European armies, and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies – right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy."

"From the religious books of ancient Egypt we learn that the power possessed by a priest or man who was skilled in the knowledge and working of magic was believed to be almost boundless. By pronouncing certain words or names of power in the proper manner and in the proper tone of voice he could heal the sick, and cast out the evil spirits which caused pain and suffering in those who were diseased, and restore the dead to life, and bestow upon the dead man the power to transform the corruptible into an incorruptible body, wherein the soul might live to all eternity. His words enabled human beings to assume divers forms at will, and to project their souls into animals and other creatures; and in obedience to his commands, inanimate figures and pictures became living beings and things which hastened to perform his behests. The powers of nature acknowledged his might, and wind and rain, storm and tempest, river and sea, and disease and death worked evil and ruin upon his foes, and upon the enemies of those who were provided with the knowledge of the words which he had wrested from the gods of heaven, and earth, and the underworld."

"The existence of God cannot be used as any scientific hypothesis: it is something different that transcends science. [...] I would be a terrible theologian if I tried to do an experiment to prove the existence of God, and a terrible scientist if I tried to explain my experimental data by hypothesizing the existence of God. [...] I'm always annoyed when people ask me about my religious opinions in interviews. I don't think they ever ask that of footballers, singers, models, categories for which I have the utmost respect. Interviewers implicitly assume that scientists possess privileged knowledge of God, but this is not true."

"As quoted in Laura Martellini, The Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi and feminicides: «The mathematics of the fifth century Hypatia victim of a patriarchal mentality that still survives today" (28 November 2023)"

"The story of Hypatia has greatly affected the collective imagination, even outside the circle of experts. She is a scientist who is killed also because a woman who was not in her place, had a public life, spoke in public and took public positions. We must never be sure that the development of science is unstoppable. Blindly trusting in the inevitability of the need that technological development has for scientific development can be a tragic mistake. The Romans preserved Greek technology without much concern for Greek science, and the Christian fanatics led by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria calmly tore Hypatia to pieces without caring at all about the long-term consequences, rather rejoicing in the disappearance of profane knowledge considered useless, if not harmful."

"It is notoriously difficult to convey the proper impression of the frontiers of mathematics to nonspecialists. Ultimately the difficulty stems from the fact that mathematics is an easier subject than the other sciences. Consequently, many of the important primary problems of the subject‍—‌that is, problems which can be understood by an intelligent outsider‍—‌have either been solved or carried to a point where an indirect approach is clearly required. The great bulk of pure mathematical research is concerned with secondary, tertiary, or higher-order problem, the very statement of which can hardly be understood until one has mastered a great deal of technical mathematics."

"Early in his college days, Minsky had had the good fortune to encounter Andrew Gleason. Gleason was only six years older than Minsky, but he was already recognized as one of the world’s premier problem-solvers in mathematics; he seemed able to solve any well-formulated mathematics problem almost instantly... “I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could know so much mathematics,” Minsky told me. “But the most remarkable thing about him was his plan. When we were talking once, I asked him what he was doing. He told me that he was working on Hilbert’s fifth problem.” Gleason said he had a plan that consisted of three steps, each of which he thought would take him three years to work out. Our conversation must have taken place in 1947, when I was a sophomore. Well, the solution took him only about five more years... I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could understand the subject well enough to have such a plan and to have an estimate of the difficulty in filling in each of the steps. Now that I’m older, I still can’t understand it. Anyway, Gleason made me realize for the first time that mathematics was a landscape with discernible canyons and mountain passes, and things like that. In high school, I had seen mathematics simply as a bunch of skills that were fun to master—but I had never thought of it as a journey and a universe to explore. No one else I knew at that time had that vision, either."

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."