people-from-chicago

"Kansas used to believe in Populism and free silver. It now believes in hot summers and a hot hereafter."

"For we Americans, though we are the most restless race in the world, with the possible exception of the Bedouins, almost never permit ourselves to travel, either at home, or abroad, as the "guests of Chance." We always go from one place to another with a definite purpose. We never amble. On the boat, going to Europe, we talk of leisurely trips away from the "beaten track," but we never take them. After we land we rush about obsessed by "sights," seeing with the eyes of guides and thinking the "canned" thoughts of guidebooks."

"It was a Native Son who, when asked by an Englishman, visiting the United States for the first time, to name the Seven Wonders of America, replied: "Santa Barbara, Coronado, Del Monte, San Francisco, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and Mount Shasta.""But," objected the visitor, "all those places are in California, aren't they?""Of course they're in California!" cried the Native Son. "Where else would they be?""

"Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to judge it. It stands apart from all the cities in the world, isolated by its own individuality, an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon, a prodigious paradox in which youth and maturity, brute strength and soaring spirit, are harmoniously confused.Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, transcendent—call it what you like—throw the dictionary at it!"

"Paul and Augustine transformed Jewish belief in a divine will directed at a ‘chosen’ people. They universalized the claims of that will and internalized it, making it available to all of humanity. In doing so, they created the potential for ‘Christian liberty’, a rightful power for individuals. By combining the assumption of human equality with the need to discover the divine will, a new relationship with deity became possible, one that was personal rather than tribal. Yet if Paul and Augustine conjured up a vision of moral freedom, it was the twelfth-century canonists who converted that vision into a formal legal system founded on natural rights."

"The Jewish sense of time was...unilinear rather than cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall control and direction of events."

"We have become victims of our own success. For we are in danger of taking this primacy of the individual as something ‘obvious’ or ‘inevitable’, something guaranteed by things outside ourselves rather than by historical convictions and struggles. Of course, every human has his or her own body and mind. But does this establish that human equality is decreed by nature rather than culture?Nature, in the form of genetic endowment, is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. A legal foundation for equality, in the form of fundamental rights for every person, is also required....Widespread complacency about the victory of an individualized model of society reflects a worrying decline in historical understanding."

"If we want to understand the distinctive constitution of Europe, we must go back to its religious foundations. For the moral beliefs which Christianity fostered still underpin civil society in Europe, the institutions that surround us."

"The institutions of the European Union are at present incomplete. A European Senate is badly needed to complete them. By creating an upper chamber in the European parliament, a new bridge could be built between national political classes, which retain democratic legitimacy, and the decision-making process in Brussels. Such a Senate should be recruited by indirect election from existing national parliaments. Indirectly elected Senators would retain their national parliamentary careers, while acquiring closer knowledge of European institutions and the habit of co-operating with each other. Such Senators ought to be leading national politicians, politicians with an experience and stature not typical of European MPs today."

"What is the crux of secularism? It is that belief in an underlying or moral equality of humans implies that there is a sphere in which each should be free to make his or her own decisions, a sphere of conscience and free action. That belief is summarized in the central value of classical liberalism: the commitment to ‘equal liberty’. Is this indifference or non-belief? Not at all. It rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others.This is also the central egalitarian moral insight of Christianity. It stands out from St Paul’s contrast between ‘Christian liberty’ and observance of the Jewish law. Enforced belief was, for Paul and many early Christians, a contradiction in terms. Strikingly, in its first centuries Christianity spread by persuasion, not by force of arms — a contrast to the early spread of Islam."

"Christianity changed the ground of human identity. It was able to do that because of the way it combined Jewish monotheism with an abstract universalism that had roots in later Greek philosophy. By emphasizing the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy, Christianity changed ‘the name of the game’. Social rules became secondary. They followed and, in a crucial sense, had to be understood as subordinate to a God-given human identity, something all humans share equally. Thus, humans were to live in ‘two cities’ at the same time."

"Liberalism, the dominant ideology of our time, has been dangerously distorted by the impact of economism. It is that impact which has knocked the citizen off his pedestal and replaced him with the consumer."

"In the twelfth century, reason began to lose the ontologically privileged position it had been accorded by an aristocratic society. Its propositions were open, at least in principle, to equal scrutiny, grounded in a shared faith. (Did not St Bernard complain that under Abelard’s influence matters of the faith were being discussed at the crossroads?) The role of reason was being democratized. Reason ceased to be something that used people, and became something people used."

"The failure of utilitarianism to address a will in which it does not altogether believe stands in sharp contrast to the mainstream of liberal thought represented by the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. For Kant, liberalism was first and last about the will....Like Christianity, Kantian liberalism identifies the greatest need of humans, as self-conscious beings, as the need for a rule of conduct, the means of governing oneself as a free and responsible agent.Modern economism's failure is that it does not face up to this question of self-government or address the issue of what is required to make the empire of the will legitimate. For the utilitarian maxim that pleasure or happiness should be maximized fails to acknowledge the need to govern the empire of the will. It provides instead an aggregative criterion for public decision-making, a criterion which is defective because it does not provide for the claims of justice. But that failure over justice reflects, in turn, utilitarianism's failure to distinguish between persons as separate and autonomous agents, as rational agents who need a rule by which to regulate their own wills. Utilitarianism merely aggregates satisfactions, looking upon society as a kind of collective self."

"Only the pride of the intellect could suppose that the human will can be completely self-determining. The incarnation revealed that something more is needed. ‘My mind, questioning itself upon its own powers, feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report.’ Augustine’s conception of the self became a subtle mixture of autonomy and dependence."

"How you doing? Good to see you Lamarr Wilson here. Back for another video."

"Enrico Fermi was the great magnet at . His grasp of physics, and both, was awesome. He took his teaching seriously. We’ve all encountered lecturers who cover up trivialities in layers of formalism and obfuscation. Fermi, the other way around, always got to the heart of things even in the most truly complex situations and exposed it with simplicity and clarity. He was almost too lucid. We could follow and marvel at his tricks and shortcuts but we often stumbled when left to our own devices."

"Everyone acknowledges that there are crucial tests to be made and information to be found in the com­ing round of experimentation; so that, given only the resources needed to exploit the visible scien­tific opportunities, we surely face very exciting times. Moreover, the proponents acknowledge, even if everything goes as expected, that there will remain much more to be known than can be revealed in the next round of experimentation. In­deed, there are very stirring visions about what may lie out there beyond the immediately foreseeable do­mains of direct, experimental at­tack. The trouble, however, is this: they conceive that these farther reaches may lie forever beyond direct exper­imental investigation and that, for what can be reached, we may alrea­dy have the basic framework in hand."

"Relativistic quantum theory predicts that particles having must come in pairs with opposite charges but identical masses (and identical lifetimes if unstable). One member of the pair is called the particle, the other the antiparticle. Which is called by which name is a matter of history and convenience. It turns out that there are other kinds of "charge" in addition to electric charge; for example, so-called . The necessity of particle-antiparticle paris obtains for charges of any kind. Thus, not only is there an antiproton to the proton, there is an antineutrino to the neutron. The neutron is electrically neutral but it has baryon number charge."

"Isidor Rabi, on a leave from in the early 1960s, came to Princeton as a visitor to its history department. On several occasions during that year, when the elevated conversation in the history department got to be too much for him, he would drop into my office to “talk physics.” We had already by that time developed a sage-rookie relationship. “What are you up to these days?” he would begin. But when I started to tell, he would cut me and all other theorists of my generation short as mere scribblers and launch into tales of the golden days of his generation, when giants trod the earth. So they had, I knew. After all, he got started in physics as quantum mechanics was being born. This put-down was conveyed with great good humor and I was not at all discomfited; indeed I relished the barbs and the tales."

"It was1964 and I was pregnant with Eric at that time and so we moved out here and we were in Long Beach for a couple of years before he then got a job at Pasadena City College. By then, well, actually, in Long Beach, I was making sculpture again. As soon as we got to California, things really started to click and when we moved to Sierra Madre and David was teaching in Pasadena, I think one of the really important things for me was that I saw one of Judy Chicago’s smoke pieces. I don’t know if you are familiar with those but she did them in several locations where she would. . . . Well, one that I remember in particular, was at the Pasadena, or, what is now the Norton Simon Museum, around that pool she had people set up colored smoke and so they would light them and then . . . so you just had this ephemeral experience that lasted for what, maybe 30 minutes. So that was my first experience with seeing something that relied on your visual memory. There was nothing left, there was no object. I was quite fascinated with that."

"Yes, he was in a graduate student in that program, and that’s how we met. We married right after I graduated and he continued as a graduate TA."

"Well, the art department there was very different than it is now."

"I started college at Michigan State because I went to . . . two summers before that I had gone to Interlochen Music Camp and they had an art program there. And so, the man who was teaching art was also teaching at Michigan State, so I got interested in going there because of their program. So, my first year, I was I was at Michigan State and then after that I transferred to Ohio State so that I could live at home. My family did not have that . . . it was always a matter of finances to, you know, how you were going to afford to do these things. All beginning art majors, you take drawing, ceramics, painting, and everything. That was my first experience with working three-dimensionally so I was completely hooked. Before that I had, in India, all the work I had done were drawings and paintings, because I was working with [Janet Sewell], and that was all that I knew. Even as a child, I was always drawing. So, it wasn’t until I went to Michigan State and took that ceramics class. There was something about, you know, not just your ideas, but the physical information that is in your body or in your hands or something, that really clicked for me, I liked that a lot."

"The sculpture department was over in some agronomy building in the basement or something because they had a very old building and, there just wasn’t room for all the classes. Now they have a huge new building. I went to interview someone that we were interviewing as a Dean who was in their Art History department, and their Art department now is in a huge building, it has like 12 floors or something and three floors are devoted just to computers. So it is a very different department now than it was then, but when I was there it was very intimate and you could work there all the time, all day, on the weekends if you wanted to. They had visiting artists. I remember David Smith came one time and spoke to us, and talked to us in our studios and I remember I was complaining to him about something, I can’t remember. I didn’t have enough of something, I was complaining because the school didn’t provide it and he just said, “Well, go get it!” And I said, “Oh yeah.” It just never dawned on me, “Oh yeah! I’m in charge of what I’m doing! If I need something, just go get it!”"

"David got a job teaching at Valparaiso University, which is where he graduated from, that’s in Indiana. And, I did some things. Again, I was kind of back to doing drawings. We were there for a couple years and then moved to California."

"No, nobody. The families really were . . . my mother’s family lived in Lafayette, Indiana and she came from a really large family, and my dad’s family, were obviously, all farmers. So, there was no role model at all. I think the most sophisticated experience I had was when I was in high school, my freshman and sophomore year, my father was in India with the Point 4 program, and I worked with a woman [whose husband was with the foreign service in Delhi], who was an artist and she had a studio. And I worked with her several mornings a week. So, that became, I suppose, that was my very first real practical experience of what an artist did. She would work in her studio in the morning . . . she would not answer the telephone. Her friends all knew not to call her at certain times, so that was probably my first experience with that."

"I grew up in Indiana and my earlier memories were of living on a farm. We lived on my grandfather’s farm in Indiana and actually, it’s interesting, that location was called Sand Hill Farm. My grandfather was Amish and his property was just adjacent to his parents’. So, they had lots of land so they were farmers and that’s where I started. When I was about six years old, I remember some friends of my parents gave my mother and I Christmas presents, and they gave my mother colored pencils and they gave me perfume, and to this day I think they must have gotten it mixed up because I was terribly insulted, I thought, you know, “I’m the artist, I should have gotten the colored pencils!” So, at a very early age, somehow, even though I was living on a farm and had really no idea what it meant to be an artist, I considered myself to be a creative person."

"What I am interested in doing is helping people see in a particular kind of way and to see what is already here- to sort of move and change things that are already a part of this particular enviornment. I am trying to do that in a very subtle way by saying: well, my human quality is a different kind of organisational quality. For instance the grey piece is laid out in a series of mounds with a grid. Everything else in the landscape is totally random. When the rocks fall, they simply fall and there is no particular design. Whereas I lay my human design on it."

"It was, we went to art museums, we traveled through Europe on our way home. We didn’t do any stopping when we went to India, but on the way back, which was better, because by then I was 16 and so I saw a lot of things I wouldn’t have seen if I was just living in Ohio."

"Yes. And my [former husband], David Elder was the T.A. (teaching assistant) for the person teaching the sculpture class."

"We’re using the power of supercomputing to see things no microscope can—how viruses move, interact, and evolve."

"And I want men and women, young and old, to see me and think, ‘That was my m’hija, That was my daughter.’ Or…’I’m an intern somewhere and I don’t feel seen. But if she could do it, so can I.’”"

"So far what we’re doing here is pure science. We’re learning facts about the universe without worrying what they’re good for."

"Something in his mind had snapped and he began collecting comics."

"The records of this first three quarters of a century of the labors and achievements of our progenitors are worthy indeed in retrospect and we do right to chronicle them. Moreover, we are but following a Catholic ideal when we mark the memory of those years and honor the names of the valiant leaders and the loyal followers who have made our cause respected."

"Like so many things, it all started with a small obsession. When I was only seven or eight, I used to lie in my comfortable old German bed at night, in every respect a most loved and blessed child, and think about it. What, I would wonder for reasons I have never totally understood, if only one person had the truth and that person was a woman? She would not voice it because the women I knew did not speak out, and so the world would be denied this crucial truth."

"… her travels … became more frequent after she left the in 1974 to become a Washington-based syndicated columnist, with her work carried in more than 120 newspapers. She boldly ventured into many dangerous climes and into face-to-face encounters not only with Castro and a number of U.S. presidents, but also with such world leaders as Argentina’s , Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Yasser Arafat and, in the first interview he granted to a Western journalist, Saddam Hussein when he was Iraq’s vice president in 1973."

"Israeli officials will tell you privately that "If the Arabs were ever to win, we would use the atom bomb.""

"Representing the people of this area has been the great honor of my lifetime. I can never thank them enough for their kindnesses towards me, their generosity with their ideas, their patience when we don’t see eye-to-eye, and their deep love of community and country."

"Being without a home should not mean being without an education. Yet that is what homelessness has meant for far too many of our children and youth today; red tape, lack of information, and bureaucratic delays that result in their missing school and missing the chance at a better life."

"What I will do is change their minds…. If I can’t change them, then I will have to work with them."

"Whether they are in a motel or jumping from couch to couch, these kids need help."

"You listen and think, "That guy sure plays some crashing and unpredictable things behind Miles," but then you listen closely and every note of his ride cymbal is somehow the exact same volume, like a typewriter."

"Today, the artistry of George Barnes isn't well-known outside of a small circle of jazz guitarists and aficionados. But his influence runs through the history of electric jazz guitar. Some claim he was the first jazz artist to record with an electric guitar. Barnes was also one of the first guitarists to use the instrument as the only melody instrument in a small group format, accompanied by a rhythm section of bass, drums and rhythm guitar."

"At age 17, he had a radical conception of the drums that rocked the world then and sounds as fresh today. You can tell he’s hearing the music in slow motion. He could see the forest, so to speak."

"His ministrations among the poor Italians of Chicago were remarkably successful. It was with profound regret that they saw him removed to the chancellorship of the archdiocese, after seven years of unselfish labour."

"You were taught in the seminary that you've got to be a missionary to bring Christ to the people. Then you get here, and you find that Christ's already here, he's already with the people. You learn the beauty of the people. That's the most important thing of all."

"Call me, Ishmael. Feel absolutely free to."

"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."