Women Academics From The United States

"Our collective work in the geosciences has made, and must continue to make, a difference in how humans interact with our planet."

"If we want to improve our odds of surviving disaster, we need to do two things. First, we need to be prepared for the rarest, biggest events. Currently we invest in infrastructure to protect us from the smaller events — be they tornados, eruptions, earthquakes or even small tsunamis that can be shut out by common storm wave barriers on exposed coastlines. But, we rarely have made the costly investments necessary to protect us from the rare, but truly devastating, big events."

"If I could take some liberty and propose a generality based on my own experience, I would say that scientists live internally with fundamentals, harmonics, overtones, and dissonances, but strive to seek and sort out the fundamental from the harmonics and overtones. Artists, on the other hand, have the liberty of portraying all of these simultaneously."

"One of the things I discovered in writing my book, The Dynamics of Disaster, was the thrill of learning about completely new things that my research would never ever have taken me into."

"I think the only thing that has a broader range of scales than geology is astronomy. Geologists really look at things from the atomic scale to the solar system scale, and we potentially think about planets beyond the solar system."

"Furthermore, in the current intellectual climate, and with the large numbers of scientists in the world today, there are few measures of creativity. We measure productivity, not not simple numerical counting, or even measures of “impact.” Perhaps as a community, we need a new form of peer evaluations of individuals within that context."

"When women our age started in the field, there were very few of us, and we were absolutely on the margins. People pretty much ignored us. I have come to realize that there was a great freedom in being ignored, that you could go after huge questions, because nobody noticed."

"And my mother shrieked ... "You can't leave that child here alone!" And, you know, fair enough. And this unmistakable voice, above and behind me, said, "Emily and I will be fine." And I turned around and said, "Thank you." And my mother looked at me and said, "You can't leave Emily with a total stranger!" And I said, "Mom, if you can't trust Joe DiMaggio, who can you trust?""

"I think the basic motivation for my research and publishing papers in the conventional media is curiosity."

"When those of us who are now middle-aged went to high school and to college, what we learned about cancer was completely descriptive. We learned how cancer cells look compared to the way normal cells look and it was beautiful, it was elegant. We learned how cancerous organs look compared to the way normal organs look. We learned about how patients decline with cancer. But it was very frustrating at least for me, because we didn’t have any understanding or sense of why these processes were occurring. Exactly what was happening, why it was it happening, when was it happening, how was it happening, all the questions you ask of mystery. We now don’t have them all answered — if it were an easy problem it would have long since been solved. But we do have a very good sense of the kinds of changes that a cell undergoes between the time it is a normal cell and the time that it is growing completely out of control, causes a tumor that can invade, metastasize and kill its host."

"India presents to the visitor an overwhelmingly visual impression. It is beautiful, colorful, and sensuous. It is captivating and intriguing, repugnant and puzzling. It combines the intimacy and familiarity of English four o'clock tea with the dazzling foreignness of carpisoned elephants or vast crowds bathing in the Ganga during an eclipse. India's displays of multi-armed images, its processions and its pilgrimages, its beggars and Its kings, its street life and markets, its diversity of people - all appear to the eye in a kaleidoscope of images. Whatever Hindus affirm of the meaning of life, death, and suffering, they affirm with their eyes wide open."

"Although Darwin was an innovator, his ideas rested on a foundation of fact and analysis that naturalists and explorers around the world had built up over the course of a century or more."

"The problem is that the attention span of humans as individuals is a year or two. If you have a disaster, you basically have a year or two to try to change human behavior, and then interest fades"

"The name Charles Darwin calls to mind a man and a theory. The theory may refer to its classical formulations in various editions of the Origin of Species or to neo-Darwinism. Charles Darwin's name may also be employed as shorthand to stand for a wide range of subjects touching on evolution. Historians of science have important roles to play in elucidating all these uses of Darwin's name: establishing the details of the man's life, filling out its context and associations, and providing historical analysis of issues current in evolutionary biology."

"It was an awesome city - captivating, challenging, and endlessly fascinating - Banaras raised some of the questions about the Hindu tradition which have interested me ever since - its complex mythological imagination, its prodigious display of divine images, its elaborate ritual traditions, and its understanding of the relation of life and death. It was Banaras that turned me to the study of India and the Hindu religious tradition.""

"As a young man Darwin was known both popularly and professionally as a geologist. In February 1859 the Geological Society awarded him its highest honor, the , for his signal contributions to the field. In reading the citation for the medal, Charles Lyell noted Darwin's studies on the growth of s, on evidence for the modern elevation of Chile and the repeated elevation of the Andes, on South American geology generally, on the distribution of boulders in Britain, and on fossil s."

"I have always claimed that there was no merit in being the only one of a kind.... I have considerable pride in the fact that some of the best work done in geology today by women, ranking with that done by men, has been done by my students.... these are all notable young women who will be a credit to the science of geology."

"That she did master the subject and decide to make it her specialty is an indication of her courage and of that determination which found nothing too difficult."

"Probably no one will ever know all the difficulties that she encountered, but little by little she achieved her purpose of making her department one of the best in the country."

"It is an interesting manifestation of the attitude of certain public critics toward change, that when the collegiate training of women was first on trial there were clamorous complaints that the health of young women was being wrecked; now the same class of public critics are loudly complaining that college women are "Amazons.""

"While the geological explorations of the South Mountain have been careful and minute and conducted by able geologists, the petrography of its rocks has never been thoroughly investigated. The microscope has not been used to assist in determining the nature and origin of the rocks, and to correct impressions colored by preconceived ideas or by an experience more or less limited to sedimentary structures. Under microscopic scrutiny and the comparative study of recent lavas, an increasing number of the so-called sedimentary rocks are proving to be igneous in origin."

"The fascination of any search after truth lies not in the attainment, which at best is found to be very relative, but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind."

"In our troubled days it is good to have something outside our planet, something fine and distant for comfort."

"Oh! Be A Fine Girl — Kiss Me!"

"Science should remain above politics, if it’s to do its job."

"By pure chance then, by pure chance now. Unfair. But he’d always known that was true of the universe."

"She had to believe it; nothing else was bearable. Kaufman was looking at self-delusion in a character strong enough to elevate it to madness."

"Every single war ever fought anywhere had spawned shadow battles between the warring governments and their own citizens. Black markets, war profiteering, blockade runners, quislings, conscientious objectors, organized crime and its less organized siblings. False government contracts, false traveling papers, false bills of lading, false passenger lists, and, for the really sophisticated, falsifying deebee programs. All it took were contacts and money."

"Amanda decided that if these people were God’s choice for instruments, then God was as crazy as Father Emil."

"Kaufman’s fault. He had not planned, had not seen far enough ahead. Failure of vision was a sin the universe did not forgive."

"That’s not a hypothesis, Lyle. That’s sheer speculation, expressed in gibberish. It says nothing."

"Do you always interfere in other people’s confrontations? Are you that most dangerous of all people, a peace-at-any-price meddler?"

"When you don’t know what you’re doing, Kaufman reflected, you can easily recycle from other efforts where you also didn’t know what you were doing."

"In the military, it can be more fatal to admit you made a mistake than to actually make one."

"History isn’t morality."

"He introduced Marbet as “project psychologist.” “I don’t believe in psychology,” Capelo said flatly. Marbet remain unruffled. “Even that based on physiology?” “If it’s based on chemistry, with replicable results from control experiments, then of course I believe in it. That’s science. Literary theories about the mind are not.” “Ah,” Marbet said. “Fairy tales, all. From Uncle Droselmeyer Freud to Lady Godiva Jennings, undressing some poor sap’s mind ‘consciousness layer’ by ‘consciousness layer.’ All for a large amount of money, of course.”"

"It takes two people to make a human tie. But only one to break it."

"An enormous amount of behavior grows out of genetic imperatives."

"Cooperation was, in the long run, a more powerful evolutionary strategy than violence, once a species was high-tech."

"And wasn’t that a common pattern in human history! Greedy religious orders, wanting to keep power for themselves, using customs and myth and threats and murder to keep the people in line and then making them believe it was all for their own good so they wouldn’t challenge the supremacy of the priesthood. Some political thinker of a few centuries ago had nailed it exactly: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”"

"Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home."

"She regarded boredom as a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself."

"Judge not. No culture was better than another, no culture should be deemed in need of uplifting. Crap! It was the worst kind of moral laziness masquerading as cultural relativism."

"California was on a path to making what was an huge and bulging prison system to be bigger and bigger and bigger. And that’s where contemporary abolition movement in the United States took root. And we fought and fought and fought, throughout urban and rural California, making common cause with labor unions, healthcare workers, faith communities, environmental justice activists, and other, to denaturalize the notion that crime was the problem for which prisons and punishment was the right solution, as a result of which the number of people in California prisons is much lower than it was even imagined it could be in the year 2000, because of the work that abolitionists did."

"I'm genuinely just so thrilled any time people are taking actions based on a principle and a belief that what does Ruth Wilson Gilmore say-where life is precious, life is precious. That makes me very excited and happy."

"Some of the leading abolitionists in the United States and around the world today are people like Mariame Kaba and Andrea Smith and Kelly Gillespie and others, who came out of work against domestic violence — i.e. it was in doing work to try to fight against violence and harm, that they realized abolition was the only way to resolve the problems that were not being resolved by having better, faster, more swift and sure punishment when somebody harmed somebody else."

"I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and mañana that is business in South America."

"How to reasonably object to artificiality, when all of anthropology spotlighted how artificial all cultural institutions actually were?"

"There are many, many ways for us to think about organized abandonment, but that thinking should bring us to consider both how capital — large and small — and state — municipal or greater — work together to raise barriers to some kinds of people and lower them for others."

"The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater."