yale-university-alumni

"Americans have always been especially prone to regard all things as resulting from the free choice of a free will. Probably no people have so little determinism in their philosophy, and as individuals we have regarded our economic status, our matrimonial happiness, and even our eternal salvation as things of our own making. Why should we not then regard our political felicity, likewise, as a virtue which is also virtue's reward?"

"Here, for the last time together, appeared a triumvirate of old men, relics of a golden age, who still towered like giants above creatures of a later time: Webster, the kind of senator that Richard Wagner might have created at the height of his powers; Calhoun, the most majestic champion of error since Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost; and Clay, the old Conciliator, who had already saved the Union twice and now came out of retirement to save it with his silver voice and his master touch once again before he died."

"Democracy is clearly most appropriate for countries which enjoy an economic surplus and least appropriate for countries where there is an economic insufficiency."

"You can't use imitation silk before the motion picture camera. The lens is even quicker to detect imitation emotion."

"Horace said: "He who would make others weep, must first have wept himself." Every motion picture director should have that on his wall."

"We movie people should not be afraid of what people will say of our work. We should not allow a word or a theory to drive us into anything or away from anything without some strong inner reason. Most of all, we should not be afraid of popularity and of financial success. Success is like posterity brought within our immediate vicinity. To have pleased millions of people with comedy, pathos or a well-constructed story is to have done a glorious thing. You can call it art, merchandise, trash or wooden nutmegs, but you cannot rob it of its noble mission—to cast light into dark places."

"When an actor loses control of himself he loses control of his audience."

"Of course they put communist propaganda in the movies! They paint a rich man as a fiend. They make every rich man in a play look like a fat boy in a museum, and every poor boy is made out as a skeleton. Actually, the only millionaires I've ever known were skinny dyspeptics—look at Rockefeller."

"We could make some very fine motion pictures if we didn't have to bother with cameras and lights."

"Woman's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking."

"The censors are going to stop crime by censoring the films. Why don't they put an end to diseases by burning the medical books which describe them?"

"Ever since I was six years old people have been prophesying that I was going to kill myself with overwork. All the prophets are now dead."

"Copaganda … is the system of government and news media propaganda that promotes mass incarceration, justifies the barbarities and profits that accompany it, and distorts our sense of what threatens us and what keeps us safe."

"Nobody should be held in a cage because they're poor. Detention should be based on objective evidentiary factors, like whether the person is a danger to the community or a flight risk — not how much money's in their pocket. ... It's so obvious to any person who spends even a small amount of time thinking about any of this stuff that there's absolutely no reason to even have pre-trial detention in these minor cases. There's no reason why someone should be held in jail for a week or even four days for not having a leash on their dog or a headlight being out or driving with a suspended license. There's no reason why an arrestee should be held in jail because he's poor in one of those cases, and there's no question that any of these people are dangerous to the community."

"I also think the scale of the change is only going to be solved by governmental action and corporate responsibility, which often will come from governmental regulation. Which is why it's so important to be able to vote and understand these issues."

"I don't buy a lot of bags or shoes, but it's easier to cut beef out of your diet than to not get the new pair of sneakers you need."

"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn't ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn't change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don't know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."

"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes — people and places and stray conversations — and refuse to stop."

"I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I'm watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll remember this forever, I'll remember this when I'm dead. Obviously, I won't. But since I don't know what death is like and there's no one to tell me what comes after it, I'll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember."

"Bobby has said, "There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective." Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom."

"My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut. I won't write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I've been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person."

"I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don't get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find. My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family's life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it."

"The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly — I had just turned thirty-four."

"I want people to feel they can do things. They may not be easy things, but the possibility of change exists."

"I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life."

"I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn't know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort."

"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to "let Bobby go wild" on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.)"

"An experience of several years, in the direction of legal studies, has convinced the author, that the progress of the student, in the different branches of the law, is vastly facilitated by a previous examination of those branches collectively, and with reference to their relations to each other."

"His thorough knowledge of law made him eminent as a teacher and enabled him to render important service to the Church."

"For more than forty years I have been a frequenter of court-rooms, and have studied the modes in which the trials of causes are conducted from the various points of view of a spectator, a court officer, a participating counsel, and a judge. The conviction was long since forced upon my mind that the enormous waste of time and energy involved in these proceedings is due to a want of method in preparing and presenting causes, whereby the conflicts of the forum, which should consist in the concentration of well ordered forces on the exact points of attack and defence, degenerate into a guerilla warfare of indefinite duration, characterized by irregular and often fruitless sallies, surprises, and retreats."

"I definitely am more spiritual than I am religious"

"sometimes I think people cast people on an intuitive level, they don’t even know they’re doing it, but this has happened a lot where you have a real connection with the person"

"I’ve read the Koran, I’ve read Indian scriptures and I really like taking from them all"

"A person who knows how to act can better direct an actor"

"she is every mother regardless of race"

"I think it’s important for people to have somebody who’s objective, and who’s not necessarily a friend or family"

"It crossed all racial and cultural lines."

"I almost made my Broadway debut much sooner"

"When you’re going through a hard time on the opposite side of the struggle there’s always the beauty of the gift that comes from the struggle"

"The more vivid an imagination you have, [the more it] brings reality to the story that you’re telling, and the more the audience will be brought in"

"Having faith is being grateful and finding the gratitude"

"TV is starting to look like the world we live in"

"When I first started in the business 20 years ago, I could count on one hand how many black actresses were working, and now I don’t even know them all"

"Even though I’m happy about the Oscars this year and there were so many black nominees, film has a ways to go. It’s not looking like the world we’re living in. We’re making progress — I’ve seen it firsthand. But it’s not reflecting this melting pot just yet."

"The greatest character actor is going to bring an aspect of themselves"

"Regulators should broaden their regulatory toolkit and move away from, or at least add to, the current narrow focus on AI impact assessments. If regulators want to truly address the harms caused by AI systems, they are going to have to do better than light-touch risk regulation."

"Framing the government interest, or interests, this way has several advantages. First, it descriptively maps on to existing laws: These laws either help individuals manage their desired level of disclosure by requiring notice, or prevent individuals from resorting to undesirable behavioral shifts by banning surveillance. Second, the framework helps us assess the strength and legitimacy of the legislative interest in these laws. Third, it allows courts to understand how First Amendment interests are in fact internalized in privacy laws. And fourth, it provides guidance to legislators for the enactment of new laws governing a range of new surveillance technologies — from automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to robots to drones."

"The newly developing “law of AI” has come to focus on risk regulation, and in many ways risk regulation seems like a good fit for regulating the development and growing uses of AI systems. AI harms tend to be systemic, occur at scale, raise causality challenges for potential litigators, and may not yet be vested (that is, they may constitute risks of future harm rather than current harm)—all challenges for traditional liability regimes."

"But as I argue in this paper, risk regulation also comes with what I call “policy baggage”: known problems that have emerged in other fields. Choosing to use risk regulation itself entails making a significant normative choice: to develop and use AI systems in the first place rather than adopt more precautionary approaches to AI. Risk regulation thus embodies what Jessica Eaglin has called a “techno-correctionist” tendency prevalent in scholarship on AI systems: the tendency to try to make technology “better” rather than to question the politics and appropriateness of its usage and to explore more systematically whether, given its harms, it should be used at all."

"Everyone has their own path to finding their passion and, for some, that may be longer than for others."