University Of California Berkeley Alumni

"The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt 'humanistic' system is a God-centered government."

"Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy."

"One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new."

"Kerr's wit extended even to the traumatic events that led to his firing. Following FBI investigations, black-listing, and machinations by Governor Reagan to stack the University of California Board of Regents against him, Kerr was removed from his office as Chancellor. A few months later, at a building-dedication ceremony at UC Santa Barbara, Kerr spoke (as previously scheduled), and in his remarks, he mentioned that he had left office just as he had entered it: "fired with enthusiasm.""

"Kerr, however, also had wit. The perfect university, he observed, provided sex for students, sports for alumni, and parking for faculty."

"The university and segments of industry are becoming more and more alike. As the university becomes tied into the world of work, the professor—at least in the natural and some of the social sciences—takes on the characteristics of an entrepreneur...The two worlds are merging, physically and psychologically...The campus and society are undergoing a somewhat reluctant and cautious merger, already well advanced. M.I.T. is at least as much related to industry and government as Iowa State ever was to agriculture."

"[Students] aren't what we ideally would like to see them. They are not independent and individualistic, but they do fit the needs of our emerging industrial society. ... the employers will love this generation, that they are not going to press very many grievances, there won't be much trouble, they are going to do their jobs, they are going to be easy to handle. There aren't going to be riots. There aren't going to be revolutions. There aren't going to be many strikes."

"The university is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before. Characteristic of this transformation is the growth of the knowledge industry, which is coming to permeate government and business, and to draw into it more and more people raised to higher and higher levels of skill. The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge is said to account for 29 percent of gross national product, and knowledge production is growing at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy. What the railroads did for the second half of the last century, and the automobile for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry; and that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth."

"It has been argued that relatively poor people will borrow to buy a house, so why not to buy a degree?"

"It is the welfare state that has made capitalism, with all its attendant benefits of economic growth, politically feasible..."

"Unless the countries of East Asia are very different, rising incomes and the weakening of extended family ties will lead to demands for rising social expenditure."

"We need a welfare state of some sort for efficiency reasons, and would continue to do so even if all distributional problems were solved."

"The welfare state is the outcome of diverse forces over nearly four centuries of developing social policy."

"Given the external benefits higher education creates, it is efficient that taxpayers subsidies should be a permanent part of the landscape."

"So far as school education is concerned, many of the assumptions necessary for market efficiency fail, the main problems being imperfect information, imperfect capital markets, and external effects."

"Efficiency advantages and disadvantages are more finely balanced than with health care - one person's 'sign of a civilized society' is another's 'society is going to the dogs'."

"Education to the extent that it raises an individual's future earnings, increases her future tax payments; in the absence of any subsidy, an individual's investment in education confers a 'dividend' on future taxpayers."

"The crucial point is that any system of health care must constitute a genuine strategy-ad hoc tinkering is a guaranteed road to disaster."

"The European Commission uses an explicit relative poverty line of 60 per cent of national average income."

"Money income is a flawed measure of individual welfare."

"Thus social insurance, in sharp contrast with actuarial insurance, can cover not only risk but also uncertainty."

"By 'trading' (i.e. pooling), individuals can acquire certainty."

"there is an efficiency case for an institutional welfare state."

"Markets can be efficient or inefficient; so can governments. thus market failure is a counterpoint to government failure."

"It is argued that regulators are frequently captured by those whom they are supposed to regulate."

"In a world of certainty, the welfare state has only a small role."

"Perfect competition must hold in product and factor markets, and also (and importantly) in capital markets. The assumption has two essential features: economic agents must be price takers; and they must have equal power."

"A reduction in the liberty of the least well off cannot be justified even if it is to their economic advantage."

"A society is a cooperative venture for the mutual advantage of its members."

"A 'socialist' country like Sweden has a highly articulated welfare state; Denmark and New Zealand (which are not highly industrialized) were among the first countries with a public system of old-age pensions; and Saskatchewan was the first Canadian province to have publicly organized health insurance."

"First, the welfare state is not a subject apart, but fits naturally into the framework of economic analysis. Secondly,the theoretical arguments support the existence of the welfare state not only for well known equity reasons but also - and powerfully - in efficiency terms."

"The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul."

"The achievement of happiness requires not the ... satisfaction of our needs ... but the examination and transformation of those needs."

"I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word."

"Error is not a mere accident of an untrained intellect, but a necessary stage or feature or moment of the expression of the truth."

"“the real world is the Community of Interpretation… If the interpretation is a reality, and if it truly interprets the whole of reality, then the community reaches its goal [i.e., a complete representation of Being], and the real world includes its own interpreter”"

"We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and ere-long, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody."

"He (William James) loved Him as a friend of his youth, a neighbour of thirty years and a high minded companion of arms in the moral struggle."

"I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana."

"Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal conscious experience…."

"Archaeology of the future is what it should be called. Archaeology of the past is very interesting because it tells us what we once were. But archaeology of the future is the study of what we're going to become, what we have a chance to become...it's a missing element in our understanding of the universe which tells us what our future is like, and what our place in the universe is. If there's nobody else out there, that's also quite important to know."

"There is a narrowness of action, though not of intent, which characterizes university departments, and scientific publications and scientists in general: if it is too popular, it is somehow vulgar and wrong. You can't really speak to those people across the street. I live next to the chemists at MIT, but I never see them. I hardly know who they are, yet between physics and chemistry it is hard to know who should study what molecule. I myself am guilty. We form communities not based on the problems of science, but on quite other things. This is part of the general split between the intelligent member of the public and the scientist who speaks in narrow focus. But the great theoretical problems which I believe the world expects will somehow be solved by science, problems close to deep philosophical issues are the very problems that find the least expertise, the least degree of organization, the least institutional support in the scientific institutions of America or indeed of the world."

"... in the late 1940s, as the new technique of radio astronomy was developed, a brand new window was opened on the universe. Through this window the outer world looked strangely different. Copious amounts of power were emitted by streams of charged particles moving with nearly the velocity of light in vast magnetized clouds in the deep recesses of space. Additional windows are now available. The infrared, the domain of heat radiation where we could see but darkly, is intensively being explored — thanks to great technological advances. Observations with satellites flown above the earth's atmosphere have wonderfully expanded our horizons. The International Ultraviolet Explorer, IRAS, and Einstein are but three examples of instruments that have revolutionized our understanding the ultraviolet, the infrared, and the X-ray regions. Ground-based radio observations, together with X-ray and gamma-ray detectors flown in satellites, have established the active field of high-energy astrophysics. The mysterious cosmic rays, long a province worked by a small band of devoted physicists, were shown to be an integral part of the expanding scene. Radio galaxies and quasars revealed powerhouses of unbelievably high wattage radiating in remote space, while pulsars made sense only in terms of incredibly dense cores of defunct stars, where the very nuclei of the atoms, themselves, were simply squeezed beyond redemption. In some instances, matter was even further crushed into black holes from which nothing, neither particle nor radiation, can ever escape."

"The wastage of the skills and talents of our capable young scientists is a disgrace to the world. The resources exist to put them all to work doing constructive things. Instead of that the substance of the earth is expanded on frivolities, on all kinds of power wasting devices and gas guzzling cars. Worst of all is the expenditure of technical expertise, energy and money on the arms race. Despite the wherewithal to wipe man off the face of the earth, ten times over, there is clamor to squander even more."

"Gaseous nebulae offer outstanding opportunities to atomic physicists, spectroscopists, plasma experts, and to observers and theoreticians alike for the study of attenuated ionized gases. These nebulae are often dusty, heated by radiation fields and by shocks. They are short-lived phenomena on the scale of a stellar lifetime, but their chemical compositions and internal kinematics may give important clues to advanced stages of stellar evolution."

"I think of physics as the liberal arts of technology. You understand the fundamental aspects of physics, and then you can learn the technology and understand how it relates to current world problems. I'm teaching the elementary physics that is most useful for someone who is trying to live in a technological world, to contribute to that world, and to make correct decisions."

"… one of the most detrimental (and least discussed) effects of the crisis in science education in the world today is that we are creating a population increasingly unable to think skeptically about a wide range of issues."

"I believe that an understanding of our place in the wider universe and the methods of science are part of the birthright of everyone living on our planet."

"I guess the other thing I find a little bit on the downside is that all the papers can now be downloaded off the web. That bothers me a little because I think in the old days, when you picked up the journal, you kind of looked at everything on the back of it, the titles, and there were things you didn’t know that much about or that you had a faint connection with, and maybe you looked at the paper; maybe you read the abstract at least. Nowadays, you just dial up what you’re interested in; you don’t see any of the rest of the literature. I do worry over this kind of compartmentalization of astronomy, which I think has gotten to be a bit out of hand..."

"Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value."