University Of Pennsylvania Alumni

"In August 1945 British military intelligence unwittingly performed a splendid experiment in the social psychology of natural scientists. They delivered the news of Hiroshima to interned German atomic scientists, and secretly recorded the conversation that resulted. Only fragments of the record have got past restrictions on “classified” material, but they are enough to reveal the German scientists’ mentality—their soul, if I may use an outmoded term. They were conscience-stricken; they had failed “German science.” Casting about for reasons, they took note of the obvious disparity in size: the American A-bomb project had been enormously larger than their own. But that contrast only deepened the anguish of self-accusation. “We would not have had the moral courage,” Werner Heisenberg, the originator of the Uncertainty Principle, exclaimed, “to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 people.” ... Implicit in that soul-searching was one measure of the scientist’s social and moral worth: his capacity to beat the competition, to win, whether fame for himself or wars for his country, or both together. When Heisenberg emerged from internment and discovered that the winners were uneasy, he turned to a different measure of the scientist’s worth. He and his colleagues had shown moral courage, he decided, of a higher order. They had dragged their feet, to withhold the A-bomb from their Nazi masters. ..."

"... Natural science is not occult but accessible to any normal mind, and it generates real, not imaginary power—which confronts us as an alien force, which may even destroy us all. Nuclear bombs are the appropriate symbol, not only in their literal capacity to destroy us all, but also in the universal irresponsibility that they embody. Scientific inventors created them as an unrestricted gift to military and political leaders, who keep insisting in advance that “the adversary” will be responsible if “we” are “obliged” to initiate some “nuclear exchange.”"

"Black Lives Matter was a piece of genus called declarative marketing. I don't know if you've ever heard of it via products in the 1970's called "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" or "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" was the name of the product. So the name of the product is called Black Lives Matter. How can you disagree with that?"

"Who came up with ethno-nationalism? [Is] swedes caring about Sweden ethno-nationalism? FU! You know, people have a right to be in their country without somebody saying "Oh, that's just blood and soil like from the nazis.""

"There is a jewish strategy. The great part of the jewish strategy is that most of it is pretty much open source. If you want to push your children really, really hard to survive and if you want to tell them "You've got a dragon breathing fire down the back of your neck because you've always been oppressed and you never know when you have to leave very quickly on short notice", you can duplicate the jewish experience. Good luck!"

"Freud’s cultural influence [on the West] is based, at least implicitly, on the premise that his theory is scientifically valid. But from a scientific point of view, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is dead as both a theory of the mind and a mode of therapy (Crews, 1998; Macmillan, 1996). No empirical evidence supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory, such as the idea that development proceeds through oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages, or that little boys lust after their mothers and hate and fear their fathers. […] It is one thing to say that unconscious motives play a role in behavior. It is something quite different to say that our every thought and deed is driven by repressed sexual and aggressive urges; that children harbor erotic feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex; and that young boys are hostile toward their fathers, who they regard as rivals for their mothers’ affections. This is what Freud believed, and so far as we can tell Freud was wrong in every respect. For example, the unconscious mind revealed in laboratory studies of automaticity and implicit memory bears no resemblance to the unconscious mind of psychoanalytic theory"

"Freud also changed the vocabulary with which we understand ourselves and others. […] While Freud had an enormous impact on 20th century culture, he has been a dead weight on 20th century psychology . . . At best, Freud is a figure of only historical interest for psychologists. He is better studied as a writer, in departments of [Western] language and literature, than as a scientist, in departments of psychology. Psychologists can get along without him […] Of course, Freud lived at a particular period of time, and it might be argued that his theories were valid when applied to European culture at the turn of the last century, even if they are no longer apropos today. However, recent historical analyses show that Freud’s construal of his case material was systematically distorted and biased by his theories of unconscious conflict and infantile sexuality, and that he misinterpreted and misrepresented the scientific evidence available to him. Freud’s theories were not just a product of his time: they were misleading and incorrect even when he published them."

"I became successful because I lived in a society that offered an opportunity to everyone."

"I'm not very optimistic about the United States from the political perspective. If the U.S. got its political act together, it has a lot of natural advantages versus a lot of other places in the world. Until we solve this business of these terribly gerrymandered districts, which send extremists to Congress, I don't see much hope for sorting out the political situation."

"If you're going to have an active and successful democracy, you have to have equal opportunity."

"The ubiquity of social media only makes the point. You look at what other people have and you can never get because you don't have education, because you don't have access to medical care, because there's no decent jobs."

"In the '50s and '60s ... if you worked hard and tried hard, you could do well. It's much harder to climb the ladder of economic success now than it was then."

"I don't think business travel is going to change dramatically. You will have three very large multinational mega carriers competing against one another, and the only thing I think that will drive is a greater focus on service levels. Because there will be three big carriers and because business travel is tremendously important, carriers rather than focusing maniacally as they have in the past on growth will focus on hanging onto their share of the business traffic, and that's going mean more attention to better service. People able to pay business-class and first-class fares are going to see improved service levels."

"I don’t give a sh*t about the low-cost carriers. I just told you a minute ago. If the legacy carriers cannot get their costs down to match the low-cost carriers, they’re finished. So, the question is, will they get their costs down? I don’t know. You know, [we probably won’t] know for 10 years."

"Fuel is a basic part of the business. Everybody basically pays the same price for fuel. It is a matter of how appropriately you trade off capital costs against operating costs. New airplanes burn less fuel but they take more capital."

"The infrastructure of the country, all the roads, all the bridges, all the water systems are just not going to be maintained. To the extent they are not maintained, our ability to compete with countries that are maintaining their infrastructure is compromised. What has been one of the great strengths of the United States over the years is just going to diminish. This political extremism that we've fallen victim to is doing very bad things to the economy."

"People refusing to take a vaccine, which is scientifically unassailable in part because they don't trust the government and in part purely for purely politics. I mean, because I'm a Republican, I'm not going to take a vaccine... in effect... the Republicans, the individuals, not the Republicans, have adopted the notion that my freedom includes the right to kill you by not taking them vaccine."

"Whether we limit travel because it's going to become more expensive or whether we limit it because we ration it or whether we do it in some other way, I don't know. But I... It just seems to me that the notion of the rate of growth that we've become accustomed to, even the rate of growth that certainly the average person would like to see, because people do want to travel, it's the greatest, it's the most desired product in most people's mind... they don't have that they'd like to have more of... Even so it seems to me that you're right, there's this conflict between what we have to do to safeguard the environment and what we would like to do in a whole variety of areas, including travel."

"Market share is important because you're going to fly between point A and point B. You need to offer a reasonable amount of frequency that's something that... That you used to have to in order to appeal to some segment of business travellers and there will be some business travel frequency. Therefore, frequency isn't going to become completely unimportant, maybe less important than it used to be. But if you're going to be a competitor in a given market, you find that market, you will, you can't, you can't rely on price, right? To say, well, I've got, I've got 2% of the capacity, but in order to fill the aeroplane, I've got to have 5% of the business. It's not going to work that way. And the consequence market share is important. You can't... To be a participant in the market. You've got to have a representative pretend age of capacity and, correspondingly, a representative share of the business. Alternatively, you're going to find yourself in very difficult times."

"Frequency has always been desired. This is what the public wants, it was frequent fights. It does not want a few flights on big airplanes. So, the industry, if they’re going to serve the public properly, isn’t going to use bigger equipment until it already has enough frequency."

"Everyone will be looking for ways to distribute around that cost difference and to add value in ways that are low cost carrier may not be able to offer that. So it promises to be an extraordinary, interesting time and the airline has always been interesting."

"The business market has always been price sensitive, within itself. The airline business has been bitterly competitive for many, many years. The consequence is that yes, business travel is not as price sensitive as leisure travel, but when you are trying to sell business travel to the companies that they work for, it's a very competitive business. So, certainly, business traveller is price sensitive. It's just price sensitive in a different way. Not in the absolute sense that the leisure business is very price sensitive in any case."

"This whole business of trying to get costs down to a competitive level has always been difficult and it will be increasingly difficult, I think, as the market changes in the way that we've discussed. I think labour cost, particularly, which has always been the sticky wicket in the major carriers, and the people who run the major carriers, and the people who work for the major carriers are going to have to be realistic."

"A struggle for existence is not a decent living. A man or woman or child may die of starvation in a city teeming with plenty. Only human life is concerned."

"Peaceful revolutions are slow but sure. It takes time to leaven a great unwieldy mass like this nation with the leavening ideas of justice and liberty, but the evolution is all the more certain in its results because it is so slow."

"The legislation of the government has been directed rather to the protection of the rights of money and property than to the best good of the citizen."

"The people who were once owners of this soil ask you for their liberty, and law is liberty."

"For wrongs like these we have no redress whatever. We have no protection from the law."

"So many seem to think that Indians fight because they delight in being savage and are bloodthirsty."

"Another time a man of our tribe went to a settlement about ten miles distant from our reserve to sell potatoes. While he stood sorting them out two young men came along.-they were white men, and one of them had just arrived from the East; he said to his companion, "I should like to shoot that Indian, just to say that I had shot one." His companion badgered him to do it. He raised his revolver and shot him."

"It seems to us sometimes that the government treats us with less consideration than it does even the dogs."

"For the past hundred years the Indians have had none to tell the story of their wrongs. If a white man did an injury to an Indian he had to suffer in silence, or being exasperated into revenge, the act of revenge has been spread abroad through the newspapers of the land as a causeless act, perpetrated on the whites just because the Indian delighted in being savage. It is because I know that a majority of the whites have not known of the cruelty practiced by the "Indian ring" on a handful of oppressed, helpless and conquered people, that I have the courage and confidence to appeal to the people of the United States."

"The tribe has been robbed of thousands of dollars' worth of property, and the government shows no disposition to return what belongs to them."

"It crushed our hearts when we saw a little handful of poor, ignorant, helpless, but peaceful people, such as the Poncas were, oppressed by a mighty nation, a nation so powerful that it could well have afforded to show justice and humanity if it only would. It was so hard to feel how powerless we were to help those we loved so dearly when we saw our relatives forced from their homes and compelled to go to a strange country at the point of the bayonet."

"The whole Ponca tribe were rapidly advancing in civilization; cultivated their farms, and their schoolhouses and churches were well filled, when suddenly they were informed that the government required their removal to Indian Territory."

"We are human beings; God made us as well as you"

"I am distressed that there are so few who indulge in the ecstacy of even a humble translation, and still fewer who attain the worthy translation."

"Because of its very personal influence men of action as far back as Cicero have proclaimed that there can be no more distinguished calling than that of instructing youth."

"It is as stupid to oust ancient history from the schools in favor of American and modern European history as it would be to knock out the first two stories of a skyscraper and expect the structure to stand."

"I think it’s wonderful to be the American Ambassador while we are able to celebrate the 100th year of U.S.-Albania diplomatic relations. As you know, last year, we celebrated 30 years since the restored relationship. And if we look across from the 100 years as well as the 30 years, I think we can say that the two of us, Albania and the United States have accomplished quite a lot. Just looking at the last 30 years alone, when I talk to friends who knew Albania in 1991 and I describe for them what we are doing together now, in 2022, they can hardly believe it. I will just give you a few examples. In 1991, as we all know, Albania was one of the poorest countries in the world and in those 30 years, as Albania broke free from the communist dictatorship, I think the people of Albania have proven themselves to be quite resilient and have inspired the world through their own determination. So, that’s why I announced when I got here that our program here, our agenda is to focus on democracy, defense, and business. So, you’ve broken free of communist dictatorship; the institutions of democracy and law, rule of law, have been installed, and we’re working to strengthen them as much as we can. You’ve gone from a country that is dependent to a country that is a member of NATO in 2009, a country that is on the doorstep of the European Union, and, as of January 1st this year, a country that sits next to the United States, China, Russia, France, Great Britain, as a member of the UN Security Council and that’s a big jump. Then of course the second issue is defense. And in those 30 years, those 100 years, we’ve gone from a communist dictatorship that was closed to the world, now Albania is host to U.S. forces, as of this year. So, this is an historic change. And then of course, finally, on business. Some of the biggest businesses are coming to Albania. We can talk more about this later, but they’re focused on energy for now and I see other areas being opened up as well, including in technology. So, we have the Skavica hydropower plant, it’s not a done deal yet, but it’s looking very good; and we have Vlora, the thermal power plant that will now be bringing in LNG. So, these have huge implications for Albania’s role in the region, not just in terms of Albania’s ability to secure energy for itself but for Albania’s contribution to the region, as a net exporter of energy and energy security."

"Every movement in the skies or upon the earth proclaims to us that the universe is under government."

"Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling."

"Four years after the death of Justinian, A.D. 569, was born at Mecca, in Arabia, the man who, of all others, has exercised the greatest influence upon the human race—Mohammed… To be the religious head of many empires, to guide the daily life of one third of the human race, may perhaps justify the title of a messenger of God."

"The Koran abounds in excellent moral suggestions and precepts; its composition is so fragmentary that we can not turn to a single page without finding maxims of which all men must approve. This fragmentary construction yields texts, and mottoes, and rules complete in themselves, suitable for common men in any of the incidents of life."

"I have to deplore the systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has contrived to put out of sight our scientific obligations to the Mohammedans. Surely they can not be much longer hidden. Injustice founded on religious rancor and national conceit can not be perpetuated forever. … The Arab has left his intellectual impress on Europe, as, before long, Christendom will have to confess; he has indelibly written it on the heavens, as any one may see who reads the names of the stars on a common celestial globe."

""But, though the Church hath evermore from Holy Writ affirmed that the earth should be a wide-spread plain bordered by the waters, yet he [Magellan] comforted himself when he considered that in the eclipses of the moon the shadow cast of the earth is round; and as is the shadow, such, in like manner, is the substance." It was a stout heart - a heart of triple brass - which could thus, against such authority, extract unyielding faith from a shadow."

"Dr. Ray Blanchard, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, is a well-noted foe to the trans community. His most recent bad idea that’s gone viral: Anime might be making trans girls transition."

"Essay on the possible relations among anime, gender dysphoria, and autogynephilia."

"No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists."

"The lessons of this peacekeeping operation, recognized as one of the rare successes of our world Organization in maintaining peace over the past several decades must inspire the United Nations further in initiatives in favour of peace"