Women Academics From The United States

"Look at another person and understand no matter how much you disagree with them… if you look, you will find good in them."

"Government doesn’t do, people do,” she said. “It’s people who make laws, it’s people who change laws. It’s people who make things happen. So my question is, what are you going to do to make the government more representative? It won’t change unless we change it."

"Puerto Rico will not only survive this. It will bloom once again."

"Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society."

"Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse."

"I find the speech in this case patently offensive, hateful, and insulting. The Court should not, however, gloss over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it does not like."

"I understand Justice Scalia's jurisprudence to begin with a proposition that we should all agree to — namely, that judges should try to interpret the law correctly, and without personal or political bias."

"In such cases, one can feel powerless and wonder why the others were not persuaded by what one took to be so salient in the case. There is, on the other hand, a singularly satisfying feeling that one gets when one has arrived at a particularly penetrating analysis and is able to convince both of one's colleagues of its merit."

"No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous."

"I don't believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it."

"I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government."

"The saw is that if you're going into academia, you're going to teach, or as Judge Lucero just said, public interest law, all of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people with court of appeals experience, because it is -- court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know -- and I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. OK, I know. I'm not promoting it, and I'm not advocating it, I'm -- you know."

"I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions."

"But mainly I learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job."

"At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory. But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. I believe this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always."

"I have been hearing for years and years about how the financial services sector pays such exorbitant wages because the people who work there are so immensely talented that they are cheap at $50 million a year. I never particularly bought that line before. But I never imagined that all those Masters of the Universe would do quite this badly. If we had paid them $50 million a year to go far, far away and leave our financial system alone, it would have been a bargain."

"They deny good luck, love, power, romance, and inspiration From La Jac Brite ointment and incense of all kinds, And condemn in writing skin brightening and whitening and whitening of minds. There is upon the federal trade commission a burden of glory So to defend the fact, so to impel The plucking of hope from the hand, honor from the complexion, Sprite from the spell."

"Josephine Miles, who traveled with her wheelchair/around the country to read poems,/said, Don't make your poem a neat package with a/bow tied at the end. She also said,/It's hard to help."

"In the roots of grammar, the stems of logic and the flowers of rhetoric take their being."

"Death did not come to my mother Like an old friend. She was a mother, and she must Conceive him. Up and down the bed she fought crying Help me, but death Was a slow child Heavy."

"You put your camera around your neck in the morning, along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."

"We live not only inside a body but within a story as well, and our story resides in the land as sure as the vision of Dorothea Lange's desperate, running horse."

"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it."

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."

"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections — and it matters which ones get made and unmade."

"All of reality in late capitalist culture lusts to become an image for its own security."

"Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

"Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously."

"[C]opyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. [...] This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art."

"From her early years on the Lazy B ranch in Arizona to her role as the first woman on the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor has personified the American pioneer. She secured a central role on the court by blending determination with a politician's skill at bringing people together."

"It is the individual who can and does make a difference even in this increasingly populous, complex world of ours. The individual can make things happen. It is the individual who can bring a tear to my eye and then cause me to take pen in hand. It is the individual who has acted or tried to act who will not only force a decision but also have a hand in shaping it. Whether acting in the legal, governmental, or private realm, one concerned and dedicated person can meaningfully affect what some consider an uncaring world. So give freely of yourself always to your family, your friends, your community, and your country. The world will pay you back many times over."

"It is true that many Americans find the Commandments in accord with their personal beliefs. But we do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment."

"Reasonable minds can disagree about how to apply the Religion Clauses in a given case. But the goal of the Clauses is clear: to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society. By enforcing the Clauses, we have kept religion a matter for the individual conscience, not for the prosecutor or bureaucrat. At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish. [...] Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"

"The First Amendment expresses our Nation’s fundamental commitment to religious liberty by means of two provisions–one protecting the free exercise of religion, the other barring establishment of religion. They were written by the descendants of people who had come to this land precisely so that they could practice their religion freely. Together with the other First Amendment guarantees–of free speech, a free press, and the rights to assemble and petition–the Religion Clauses were designed to safeguard the freedom of conscience and belief that those immigrants had sought. They embody an idea that was once considered radical: Free people are entitled to free and diverse thoughts, which government ought neither to constrain nor to direct."

"The Constitution does not protect the sovereignty of States for the benefit of the States or state governments as abstract political entities, or even for the benefit of the public officials governing the States. To the contrary, the Constitution divides authority between federal and state governments for the protection of individuals."

"It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren."

"The proper role of the judiciary is one of interpreting and applying the law, not making it."

"I do not believe it is the function of the judiciary to step in and change the law because the times have changed. I do well understand the difference between legislating and judging. As a judge, it is not my function to develop public policy."

"Whenever you say anything good about East Germany [...] immediately somebody jumps up and says, "My God, you’re a Stalinist..." I'm not defending everything about it, of course. But I laboured on the chapter that talks about the east. I fact-checked it; I had somebody else fact-check it. I knew that I was going to get a lot of flak for that. But in the beginning, East Germany did a better job. They just did."

"Where the account goes awfully wrong is in the musings on East Germany, where Neiman is prone to accepting the GDR’s self-serving use of its "anti-fascist" badging at a face value it never merited, despite the good faith of many cultural figures in the idea. East Germany was sired by Stalinism. Former Nazis were allowed to take "useful" positions in the state apparatus. When I worked with Markus Wolf, the former head of East German intelligence, on his memoirs, his admission that most shocked me was that the east had, at one point, tacitly supported neo-Nazi demonstrations in the west, perversely in order to demonstrate the revival of fascism in the Federal Republic."

"What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress."

"Statues are not about history. We don't memorialize each piece of history. We memorialize things that we want to value and things that we want our children to walk by and say "This person embodied the values that I care about." Therefore, statues are about values not about history."

"I was part of the national German committee to plan celebrations for the 2005 Einstein Year. One hundred years after Einstein made his most famous discoveries, the left-leaning government had decided to spend 20 million euros to show its support of science in general and of left-wing cosmopolitan (ahem!) intellectuals in particular. As the only Jew on the committee, my main function would be as what Orthodox Jews call a mashgiach—someone who guarantees that the premises are kosher. There were exhibits, there were banners, there were lectures, and more. What if they made a mistake? I spotted one in an early brochure, where Einstein was described as a "fellow-citizen-of-Jewish-background." Did the committee know, I asked, that Einstein had expressly ridiculed that weird circumlocution? "He just called himself a Jew," I said. "Jews don't consider the word insulting." "Is that so, Frau Neiman?" replied the minister of science. She was flustered. "That’s very helpful, just the sort of thing we need to know." Jew in German has two syllables, not one, and I suppose that buried deep in some dreams are memories of sinister mobs shouting Ju-dah! Ju-dah! Perhaps even for atheists, echoes of Judas Iscariot play a role. Germans use phrases with nine syllables, like fellow-citizen-of-Jewish-extraction or fellow-citizen-of-Jewish-heritage, in order to avoid using the obvious two. The habit is so engrained that despite my objection, the second draft of the brochure used the same phrase. "I know we all have many duties here," I said at the next meeting. "But perhaps it has been forgotten that I mentioned that Einstein didn't like this designation. He made fun of it several times." I was learning to use certain forms of polite circumlocution myself. "Of course," said the minister’s deputy. "We’ll see it gets changed." They never did; too many nightmares worked against them."

"Those who cannot find [moral clarity] are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead."

"[I]t turns out to be the case that torture's not very effective. And so if you're dealing with someone who has no moral qualms whatsoever, like Donald Rumsfeld, it might be worth pointing out that its not in his interests to continue a policy that's simply feeding us false information. I mean, somebody where you know that the moral - whatever part of the brain that deals with moral reactions, they're defunct at some point - but … it’s a good thing that we found that out. It’s a bit or argument that we can use to make abolishing torture more appealing to people. But supposing it did... I mean the whole point is... I mean you're talking about two very very different levels of objection, right? Supposing it were true that every time you tortured someone, they actually revealed what you couldn't get revealed in some other way. Would you then continue torturing? One of the problems with those arguments is that someone like Rumsfeld or whomever will be able to come up with a case - somebody who was tortured and did reveal information that intelligence wanted to know (there'll be 70 other cases where it didn't). But they'll be able to come up with one. And then what do you say? Well it's alright??"

"One of the great moral advances of the Enlightenment was abolishing torture. Its interesting to think how far we've come when we think about the fact that 300 years ago in every square of every civilized city, certainly in Europe, torturing people to death was not just that took place, but was something you would've taken your children to go and see on a Saturday afternoon. Right? I mean, that's what was happening. Now, the question is what did people learn, empirically, when they decided, "Oh gosh, drawing and quartering actually causes too much suffering; I think we'll put it out?" I mean, I don't think there's a fact that changed there that somebody had to realize. I think the example, by the way, is particularly important because while it shows that there can be moral progress, it also shows that it's absolutely not necessary, and there can also be moral regression, as in the case of the current administration. But I don't see that what's taking place somehow when Bush decides to legalize torture and thereby cancel one of the major achievements of the Enlightenment (Well he has! Right? I mean many of the achievements of the enlightenment, but that one in particular.) I don't see that what's happened is that there's something that he doesn't know. That he could somehow be tutored on."

"I’m delighted to hear someone make the claim that there is moral progress because it can be such a incendiary thing to say, and its something that I say and deeply believe in."

"[W]e should be clear that neither genuine religious nor genuine moral impulses will ever be expressed in terms that tie the two essentially together. If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you’ve reduced us to the ethical level of 4 year olds. "If you follow these commandments you’ll go to heaven, if you don’t' you'll burn in hell" is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children."

"Any ethics that needs religion is bad ethics, and any religion that tries to do so is bad religion. Of course, there are plenty of both around."

"Far less import than your belief of whether god exists is what you think your belief entails. Does it direct your behaviour by rules and commandments that are set out before you or does it require you to think them through yourself? Does it require you to try to make sense of the world, or does it give up on sense itself? And I think these are the crucial distinctions. Not whether you add belief in a god to them."