Princeton University Alumni

"Belgium had no prior history in the slave trade, nor of African slaves. Léopold could fight against slavery without any hint of hypocrisy, even of the ahistorical type advanced by Hochschild. And it was slavery, not rubber operations, that contemporary observers viewed as the biggest threat to the people of the Congo."

"Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice."

"The rubber quotas imposed on natives in this 15 percent of the territory were enforced by native soldiers working for the companies or for the EIC itself. In many areas, the rubber came with ease and the natives prospered. The rubber station at Irengi, for instance, was known for its bulging stores and hospitable locals, whose women spent a lot of time making bracelets and where “no one ever misses a meal,” noted the EIC soldier George Bricusse in his memoirs. Elsewhere, however, absent direct supervision, and with the difficulties of meeting quotas greater, some native soldiers engaged in abusive behavior to force the collection. Bricusse noted these areas as well, especially where locals had sabotaged rubber stations and then fled to the French Congo to the north. In rare cases, native soldiers kidnapped women or killed men to exact revenge. When they fell into skirmishes, they sometimes followed long-standing Arab and African traditions by cutting off the hands or feet of the fallen as trophies, or to show that the bullets they fired had been used in battle. How many locals died in these frays is unclear, but the confirmed cases might put the figure at about 10,000, a terrible number."

"Nonstandard analysis is a technique rather a subject. Aside from theorems that tell us that nonstandard notions are equivalent to corresponding standard notions, all the results we obtain can be proved by standard methods. Therefore, the subject can only be claimed to be of importance insofar as it leads to simpler, more accessible expositions, or (more important) to mathematical discoveries."

"Davis became one of the earliest computer programmers when he began programming on the ORDVAC computer at the University of Illinois in the early 1950s. His book Computability and Unsolvability ... first appeared in 1958 and has become a classic in theoretical computer science."

"The analysis of algorithmic process that emerged from the work of Gödel, Church, Turing, and Post has been of great importance not only for theoretical investigations but also for practice, by providing an expansive framework for computer science. The discussion of computation-like processes that transcend the limits imposed by the Church–Turing thesis can likewise be framed either in terms of theory or of practice."

"Takeuti has studied models of axiomatic set theory in which the “truth values” are elements of a complete Boolean algebra of projections on closed subspaces of a Hilbert space, and has found that the real numbers of such a model can be taken to be self-adjoint operators which can be resolved in terms of projections belonging to the Boolean algebra. It is suggested that this is the mathematical source of the replacement of real quantities by operators in quantizing a classical description, and that quantum theory involves a relativity principle with Takeuti's Boolean algebras serving as reference “frames.”"

"A partially computable function may be thought of as one for which we possess an algorithm which enables us to compute its value for elements of its domain, but which will have us computing forever in attempting to obtain a functional value for an element not in its domain, without ever assuring us that no value is forthcoming. In other words, when an answer is forthcoming, the algorithm provides it; when no answer is forthcoming, the algorithm has one spend an infinite amount of time in a vain search for an answer."

"Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

"It is the nature of peoples to see the ancient foes, and to ignore those newly arising."

"America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone."

"War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity."

"Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable."

"Collective security had a fine sound, but it was still little more than a word; it would still be the United States, and the United States alone, that held the far frontier. No one else had the will or the power."

"If war is to have any meaning at all, its purpose must be to establish control over peoples and territories, and ultimately, this can be done only as Alexander the Great did it, on the ground."

"To continue to utilize the forces of our Air and Navy without an effective ground element cannot be decisive."

"There had been many brave men in the ranks, but they were learning that bravery of itself has little to do with success in battle."

"The problem is to see not what is desirable, or nice, or politically feasible, but what is necessary."

"For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk."

"A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal."

"To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong."

"The United States will be forced to fight wars of policy during the balance of the century. This is inevitable, since the world is seething with disaffection and revolt, which, however justified and merited, plays into Communist hands, and swings the world balance ever their way."

"History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military."

"Because the American people have traditionally taken a warlike, but not military, attitude to battle, and because they have always coupled a certain belligerence - no American likes being pushed around - with a complete unwillingness to prepare for combat, the Korean War was difficult, perhaps the most difficult in their history."

"Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection."

"When you don’t grow up in a bubble, it makes talking to people outside of various bubbles that much easier, and more natural. I know from first-hand experience that most people are just badly misinformed; they’re not evil, they just don’t know what they don’t know. And so you can’t take any of their vitriol all that personally, or that seriously. All you can do is try to speak the truth in tones and terms that they can understand."

"A nation of lost and fatherless boys and drifting young men is terrified that we have too much patriarchy. Why, it reinforces my belief in the existence of demons: unassisted man could never be so blank and stupid as to fear that fathers have too much authority when boys and girls by tens of millions grow up with none at all. Only Beelzebub can explain it. A nation of fornicators, sodomites, divorcees, pornographers, and users of pornography, a nation of casual obscenity, erupts in wrath against boorish flirting. A nation of cultural amnesia tears down memorials. A nation that murders a million of its children every year is full of benevolent neighbors who have the social workers at your door if they see your child riding a bicycle without a helmet. A nation of the religiously indifferent, ruled by innumerable and anonymous puppet-masters of bureaucracy, suspects a theocrat around every corner."

"The academic politician is interested in victory. He has the moral code of Machiavelli, but, because he is too impatient to submit to the instruction of history, he has not the old master’s shrewd sense of human limitations and contradictions. He makes the worst of rulers: he is neither a lover of truth, nor a practical man of the world, nor an habitual examiner of his all-too-human and persistent failings."

"Like anything else that man makes, culture is nowhere pure, and is often shot through with dreadful evil. But it is in a way natural to man to cultivate a way of life that transcends the generations in time, and that in being reaches out to God himself. I suggest that the unnatural is to the natural as mass phenomena are to culture —especially the mass phenomena such as they are now."

"If you are a really serious student, you will be in science, or finance, or politics—you will be in the business of money or power. Everything is about ourselves. We don’t want to study other cultures. We want to make other people study about us, and from our preferred point of view. I say to students, “Here, let me teach you about Milton,” the author of the greatest poem in the English language. The students reply, “No, let us teach you about us.” Dear Narcissus, there is a great and beautiful world beyond that pool."

"What is the worst thing about living near an open sewer? It is not that you sicken at the stench of it every time you leave your front door. It is that the noisome vapors are so pervasive, and you have lived with them so long, you no longer notice it. What is the worst thing about living in the rubble of a civilization? It is not that you shed a tear for the noble churches and courts and town halls you once knew, as you recall years filled with religious services, parades, block parties, and all the bumptious folderol of an ordinary civic life. It is that you do not even suspect that such things existed."

"As a basic reason for action, we first need to figure out what the truth about God is to then be in harmony with him. This explains the intelligibility of the non-believer who is a seeker, seeking out the truth about God — is there a God? Is there only one God? Who is God? What does he demand of me? Even before arriving at answers to these questions, the pursuit makes sense because the religious good or end of our nature is there. As we discover more truths about God, we’re able to act more, or more fully, in harmony with him and thus flourish more completely with respect to religion. And, of course, the full flourishing of this aspect of our life will only come in the kingdom."

"The propagation of elastic waves in a homogeneous solid is governed by a hyperbolic system of three linear second-order partial differential equations with constant coefficients. When the solid is also isotropic, the form of these equations is well known and provides the foundation of the conventional theory of elasticity (Love 1944). The explicit solution of the initial value, or Cauchy, problem for the isotropic case was found by Poisson, and in a different way by Stokes (1883). If the initial disturbance is sharp and concentrated, the resulting disturbance at a field point will consist of an initial sharp pressure wave, a continuous wave for a certain period, and a final sharp shear wave. The disturbance then ceases."

"The mathematical theory of the Navier-Stokes equations has centered upon basic questions of the existence, uniqueness, and regularity of solutions of the initial value problem for fluid motions in all of space or in a subdomain of finite or infinite extent. Such solutions, when they can be constructed or shown to exist, represent flows of a viscous incompressible fluid. In two space dimensions the theorem of existence, uniqueness and regularity was essentially completed thirty years ago by the work of Leray ..., Lions ... and Ladyzhenskaya ... who showed that a smooth solution of the initial value problem exists for arbitrary square-integrable initial data. For viscous, incompressible fluid motions in three space dimensions, ... the theorem of existence uniqueness and regularity has been proved only for sufficiently small initial data or in special cases such as cylindrical symmetry that essentially reduce the problem to two space dimensions in some sense."

"The magnitude of Fundy tides may be seen as having been reached by a balance between a dissipative mechanism, with assumed quadratic frictional forces, and an energy imparting mechanism in the deep ocean where work done by the tide raising force is proportional to distance travelled and hence to the first power of amplitude. Further, it now appears that the second and third North Atlantic modes are those primarily stimulated by the Fundian resonance. To represent these processes within one model both the continental shelf shallows and oceanic areas must be included, as well as their zone of interaction across the continental shelf."

"The theory of harmonic forms in Riemannian manifolds may be regarded as a generalization of potential theory. It is therefore natural that the boundary value problems of this theory which generalize the classical Dirichlet and Neumann problems should play an important role in the theory."

"Against the background of communist = Soviet = Stalinist, two interlocking stories of the predominate. The first is that communism collapsed under its own weight: it was so inefficient, people were so miserable, life was so stagnant, that the system came to a grinding halt. It failed. Linked to Stalinism, the story of failure features chapters on , and terror. Like most ideological constructions, it's not quite coherent: it neglects the fact that the Stalin period was also a period in which the US and the USSR were allies. In the era most exemplary of the Soviet Union's injustice and illegitimacy, the period when the USSR was present not as a failed state but a strong one, the US was closer to the regime than at any other time in its history. The second, related, story of the collapse of communism is that it was defeated. We beat them. We won. Capitalism and liberal democracy (the elision is necessary) demonstrated their superiority on the world stage. Freedom triumphed over tyranny. The details of this victory matter less than the ostensible undeniability. After all, there is no Soviet Union anymore."

"September 2011 shattered the ideology of an invincible Wall Street much as September 2001 shattered the illusion of an invulnerable United States. All of a sudden and seemingly out of the blue, people outraged by the fact that "banks got bailed out" and "we got sold out" installed themselves in the financial heart of New York City. Occupying the symbol of capitalist class power, they ruptured it. The ostensible controllers of the global capitalist system, still reeling from the crash of 2008, appeared to have lost control over their own cement neighborhood. Hippies with tents and cops with barricades had turned Lower Manhattan into a chaotic mess. Those seeking to combine the people's work, debts, hopes, and futures into speculative instruments for private profit confronted a visible and actual collective counterforce. There in the power of the people where investment banks and hedge funds had already identified an enormous social surplus, a cadre of the newly active located an inexhaustible political potential. It was like a giant hole had been opened up in the steel and glass citadel of the financial class. Through it, traders, brokers, and market-makers – as well as everybody else – could see the possibility of a world without capitalism. Wall Street was occupied."

"Although the contemporary Left might seem to agree with the mainstream story of communism's failure – it doesn't work, where "it" holds a place for a wide variety of unspecified political endeavors – the language of failure covers over a more dangerous, anxiety-provoking idea – communism succeeded. The Left isn't afraid of failure, it is afraid of success, the successful mobilization of the energy and rage of the people. Leftists really fear the bloody violence of revolution, and hence they focus on displacing anger into safer procedural, consumerist, and aesthetic channels. As emphasizes, the legacy of anti- is a preference for the condemnation of some kinds of violence but not others: leftists join democrats, liberals, and conservatives in denouncing the while they virtually ignore the "far more bloody ." Even those who see themselves as part of some open and varied constellation of the Left condemn the violence of the people against those who would oppress them. State violence and the force of is taken for granted, assumed, cloaked in a prior legitimacy or presumed to be justified in the interest of order."

"The contemporary Left claims not to exist. Whereas the Right sees left-wing threats everywhere, those on the Left eschew any use of the term "we," emphasizing issue politics, , and their own fragmentation into a multitude of singularities."

"The positions communism as a threat because communism names the defeat of and alternative to capitalism. It recognizes the crisis in capitalism: over-accumulation leaves the rich sitting on piles of cash they can't invest; industrial capacity remains unused and workers unemployed; global interconnections make unneeded skyscrapers, fiber-optic cables, malls, and housing developments as much a part of China as the US. At the same time, scores of significant problems – whether food shortages linked to climate change, energy shortages resulting from oil dependency, or drug shortages resulting from the failure of private pharmaceutical companies to risk their own capital – remain unmet because they require the kinds of large-scale planning and cooperation that capitalism, particularly in its contemporary finance and communications-driven incarnation, subverts."

"Precisely because the Soviet Union adopted "the capitalist heavy-industry definition of economic modernization," socialism remained caught within a very specific capitalist model of economic development. The Soviets did not reconstruct American capitalism. They glorified it. (Indeed, for some Soviets, Henry Ford was as close to a saint as one could get.)"

"The communist horizon appears closer than it has in a long time. The illusion that capitalism works has been shattered by all manner of – and we see it everywhere. The fantasy that democracy exerts a force for economic justice has dissolved as the US government funnels trillions of dollars to banks and the European central banks rig national governments and cut social programs in order to keep themselves afloat. With our desiring eyes set on the communist horizon, we can now get to work on collectively shaping a world that we already make in common."

"are the first generation of US Americans to have life prospects worse than their parents. The astronomical means that many young people put off the major purchases and life events linked to adulthood in the US -- buying a car or a house, getting married. At the same time, in highly populated cities like San Francisco, LA, Seattle, and NYC, rents are out of control. And we don’t have national healthcare. So paying for the basics of everyday life has become impossible. And we are told repeatedly that is in crisis and won’t survive. As one young person told me: 'My retirement program is socialism'."

"The US right calls everything it doesn’t like 'communist'. They call Clinton and Obama 'communists'. With 'communist' as the go-to name for anything that isn't , its acceptability increases. If you don't like the right, you're a communist."

"Capitalism is clearly and undeniably failing. It's directly responsible for the and everybody knows it."

"Finally, the Prime Minister has to realise that more than anything else, he will be remembered in history most by how he and his government handled this grave national peril. His leadership will require bringing the country together in a way that has not been his government’s strong suit. He needs to strongly lead with a spirit of cooperation with all states (such as a regular conference call with all the chief minsters), reach out to the political opposition and to all communities. History will then remember him as a healer and unifier, which will be critical to pull the country out from a spiraling national crisis."

"Five, the government needs to recognise that in a crisis of this magnitude it needs the best expertise and competence, whether bureaucrats (serving or retired), or personnel from the private sector and civil society. Loyalty and ideology may have their place — but the costs today are simply too grave and manifest."

"Four, from health care to supply chains, from the civil services to public utility personnel, several million Indians will necessarily be part of maintaining essential services. They are serving the country at considerable risk to themselves. They need to have first claims to personal protective equipment and testing and better life insurance."

"Three, the government needs to leverage the credibility and trust enjoyed by many civil society organisations to get essential services to vulnerable populations who the state cannot reach easily, such as migrants, older people or people with disabilities."