Academics From The United States

"I mean, if I'm in situations, and I just mean even at dinner or something, I'm with somebody, I'm usually curious, and the conversation will proceed with questions. And I guess it's also because I'm pretty interested in what anybody's doing, whoever I happen to be with."

"It certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood"

"The activity of rooting for baseball and other sports teams is one of the strongest expressions of community remaining in our society."

"Some owners are competent, effective business people who care about the game. Many others do not share these attributes."

"Baseball's popularity and, more so, it's revenues continue to increase."

"The first baseball game ever televised was a battle for fourth place in the Ivy League between Columbia and Princeton on May 17, 1939."

"Baseball performance is an outcome of opposing forces."

"Before becoming governor, Nelson Rockefeller offered to buy the Dodgers to keep them in New York."

"Consider for instance, the facts that Jose Canseco was picked in the fifteenth round of the amateur draft, Roger Clemens the twelfth, Ryne Sandberg the twentieth, and Nolan Ryan the tenth."

"How is it that the average CEO in Japan receives an annual income of $300,000 while the average CEO in the United States earns $2.8 million?"

"While Babe Ruth's $80,000 in 1930 was eighty times the average U.S. income, Don Mattingly's $3.4 million in 1991 was 160 times the average."

"It is well to recall that in 112 years of major league baseball, there has been only one bankruptcy filing."

"Nobody ever said that capitalism guarantees profit."

"Between 1903 and 1991 the value of the Yankees appreciated at a compound annual rate of 11.4 percent."

"Baseball's owners must be the only U.S. citizens whose parents never told them the story of the boy who cried wolf. Their perennial cry of evaporating profits and imminent catastrophe in the presence of rapidly growing revenues and escalating franchise values is hard to take seriously."

"Perhaps if movie theaters also played the national anthem before their main attractions, the Internal Revenue Service would allow Hollywood studios to depreciate their actors."

"With today's high salaries, long term contracts, and corporate penetration of the ownership ranks, it is commonplace to hear commentators rue baseball's growing commercialization, claiming it is undermining the aesthetics and competitive spirit of the game. In fact baseball's growing commercialism has been a constant since the 1860s."

"Baseballs exemption from antitrust statutes, based on the notion that it was not involved in interstate commerce, erroneous back in 1922 and more so in the 1950s, became even more anomalous in 1957, when the Supreme Court declared football to be subject to the antitrust statutes and stated that baseball's exemption was "unreasonable, illogical and inconsistent.""

"It is true that I described antisocial, parsimonious, sanctimonious, and wasteful behavior by the owners over the years, but baseball's problem is structural, not individual. Put any individual into a position of power with an opportunity to make tens of millions of dollars in an industry that is on a cultural pedestal and protected from all forms of competition, and the odds are against the second coming of Lee Iacocca or Ralph Nader."

"Kerr's wit extended even to the traumatic events that led to his firing. Following FBI investigations, black-listing, and machinations by Governor Reagan to stack the University of California Board of Regents against him, Kerr was removed from his office as Chancellor. A few months later, at a building-dedication ceremony at UC Santa Barbara, Kerr spoke (as previously scheduled), and in his remarks, he mentioned that he had left office just as he had entered it: "fired with enthusiasm.""

"Kerr, however, also had wit. The perfect university, he observed, provided sex for students, sports for alumni, and parking for faculty."

"The university and segments of industry are becoming more and more alike. As the university becomes tied into the world of work, the professor—at least in the natural and some of the social sciences—takes on the characteristics of an entrepreneur...The two worlds are merging, physically and psychologically...The campus and society are undergoing a somewhat reluctant and cautious merger, already well advanced. M.I.T. is at least as much related to industry and government as Iowa State ever was to agriculture."

"[Students] aren't what we ideally would like to see them. They are not independent and individualistic, but they do fit the needs of our emerging industrial society. ... the employers will love this generation, that they are not going to press very many grievances, there won't be much trouble, they are going to do their jobs, they are going to be easy to handle. There aren't going to be riots. There aren't going to be revolutions. There aren't going to be many strikes."

"The university is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before. Characteristic of this transformation is the growth of the knowledge industry, which is coming to permeate government and business, and to draw into it more and more people raised to higher and higher levels of skill. The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge is said to account for 29 percent of gross national product, and knowledge production is growing at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy. What the railroads did for the second half of the last century, and the automobile for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry; and that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth."

"One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new."

"We do not ask ourselves what the ultimate ideas behind our civilization are that have brought us into this danger; we do not search for the human face behind the bewildering array of instruments that man has forged; in a word, we do not dare to be philosophical."

"As a teacher of philosophy, a very dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to observe how precarious a hold the intellect has upon American life; and this is not true merely of the great majority of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and embarrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people."

"Now at the end, we come back to the beginning: to the situation of the world here and now, from which all understanding must start and to which it must return. In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners, who are ultimately in question."

"One does wish that Sartre would pause for a while to regroup his forces. The man really does write too much."

"That existence has meaning, finally, only as the liberty to say No, and by saying No to create a world."

"The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though the negativity is also creative."

"Heidegger's philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent."

"Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself."

"Nietzsche's life has all the characteristics of a psychological fatality."

"The anguish of loss may be redeemed, but can never be mediated."

"The peasantry are wiser in their ignorance than the savants of St Petersburg in their learning."

"The will to power is weakness as well as strength, and the more it is cut off and isolated from the rest of the human personality, the more desperate, in its weakness, it can become."

"Poets are witnesses to Being before the philosophers are able to bring it into thought."

"The instincts of man are so earth-bound that they shrewdly sense it whenever the approach of logic threatens them."

"Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine (in the Confessions) asks, Who am I? — and this shift is decisive."

"Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man."

"Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a conversion. This is surely an existential beginning."

"The bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence. Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age."

"Anyone who attempts to gain a unified understanding of modern art as a whole is bound to suffer the uncomfortable sensation of having fallen into a thicket of brambles."

"A recognition of limits, of boundaries, may be the only thing that prevents power from dizzy collapse."

"Jaspers sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society."

"Journalism has become a great god of the period, and gods have a way of ruthlessly and demonically taking over their servitors."

"Where feudalism is concrete and organic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capitalism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man from the earth."

"The decline of religion in modern times means simply that religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler of man's life, and that the Church is no longer the final and unquestioned home and asylum of his being."

"Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be an Existentialist."