Harvard University Faculty

"At its best “art” is subversive and can change the world. Thus, making it not only a viable threat, but a dangerous one."

"Whatever sexuality means today and did not mean before, the word, like others before it, has always attempted to describe something we know is not reducible to a word, an identity, or even a set of behaviors."

"in many ways my personal life (which I wrote about a lot) was really a public life. This may not be the case for many, even most people, but for me my private and public life became one. People can say what they thought – and did – but what I was doing, felt perfectly natural to me."

"Shame...is a first rate form of social control. Shame is what keeps us in line, what prevents us from discovering not so much who we are, but what we might become."

"the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, [[Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today. Women and men who experienced and expressed sexual desires for their own sex and those who did not conform to conventional gender expectations have always been present, in both the everyday and the imaginative life of our country. They have profoundly helped shape it, and it is inconceivable, and ahistorical, to conceptualize our traditions and history without them."

"Interpretations are best made with the long view in mind."

"The second decade of the twenty-first century—just 150 years after Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kurtbeny, early LGBT rights theorists, ignited the idea of same-sex freedom in 1868—we find ourselves in a heady, global maelstrom of unimaginable liberation and continued stark oppression."

"LGBT people are simply Americans-no less and no more. The idea of America has existed, in some form, for five hundred years. LGBT people, despite enormous struggles to be accepted and to be given equality, have made America what it is today-that great, fascinating, complicated, sometimes horrible, sometimes wonderful place that it was in the beginning."

"History is an ongoing process through which we understand and define ourselves and our lives."

"entertainment in its broadest sense-popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels-has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them."

"Today we routinely use LGBT, a fairly recent, and accepted, amalgamation of identities, each of which has a specific history that often had little to do with the others."

"Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America-a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer."

"in America, equality under the law is a complicated affair. Certainly it is true that while laws are for everyone, they are often enforced mainly against the disenfranchised."

"language is both an entryway and a dead end."

"A Queer History of the United States stops at 1990, but LGBT communities have seen enormous changes since then. By the late 1980s, the rise of the so-called "Gaybe Boom" was beginning, as increasing numbers of children were born into two-parent same-sex households. Lesléa Newman's children's book Heather Has Two Mommies-which became a target in the culture wars of the 1990s-was emblematic of this sea change in the community."

"Youth sexuality has often been, like homosexuality, unspeakable in our culture. This has been America's dirty little secret: teens and children think about sex. Some have sexual desires for members of their own gender. Young people coming out earlier, and often finding support in their homes and schools, is a major political advancement. For over a century, charges of "molestation," "corruption of a minor," and "recruitment” have been used-explicitly by J. Edgar Hoover, Anita Bryant, and others, and implicitly by many who are opposed to same-sex marriage-to demonize lesbians and gay men and deny them full citizenship. There may always be bias against LGBT people, but the charges of molestation will eventually fade as more youth come out."

"Anything that liberates is not without risk."

"Yes raster is faster, but raster is vaster, and vector just seems more correcter."

"freedom itself is a disciplined thing. Craft is that discipline which frees the spirit; and style is the result."

"It [art] communicates directly without asking approval of any authority. Its values are not those of set virtues, but are of the essential nature of man, good or bad. Art is one of the few media of expression which still remains unedited, unprocessed, and undictated. If its hazards are great, so are its potentialities magnificent."

"I think that one of the great virtues of the university lies in its being a community in the fullest sense of the word, a place of residence, and at the same time one of personal affirmation and intellectual rapport."

"I believe that there is no kind of experience which has not its potential visual dimension or its latent meanings for literary or other expression. Know all you can mathematics, physics, economies, and particularly history. As part of the whole education, the teaching of the university is therefore of profoundest value."

"What is it about us, the public, and what is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?"

"There are, roughly, about three conditions that seem to be basic in the artist's equipment: to be cultured, to be educated, and to be integrated."

"One's education naturally begins at the cradle. But it may perfectly well begin at a later time too. Be born poor... or be born rich... it really doesn't matter. Art is only amplified by such diversity."

"I have always held a notion of a healthy society as one in which the two opposing elements, the conservative and the creative (or radical, or visionary, or whatever term is best applied to the dissident), exist in a mutual balance. The conservative, with its vested interest in things as they are, holds onto the present, gives stability, and preserves established values (and keeps the banks open). The visionary, always able to see the configuration of the future in present things, presses for change, experiment, the venture into new ways. A truly creative artist is inevitably of this part of the society."

"Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the pre-condition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people. The degree of nonconformity present-and tolerated-in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health."

"it is always in the future that the course of art lies"

"Conformity is a mood and an atmosphere, a failure of hope or belief or rebellion."

"In art, the conservative is the vigorous custodian of the artistic treasures of a civilization, of its established values and its tastes-those of the past and even those present ones which have become accepted. Without the conservative we would know little of the circumstances of past art; we would have lost much of its meaning; in fact, we would probably have lost most of the art itself. However greatly the creative artist may chafe at entrenched conservatism, it is still quite true that his own work is both sustained and enriched by it."

"each of them [artists] stands out as an island of civilized feeling in an ocean of corruption. Civilization has freely vindicated them in everything but their nonconformity."

"Today's conformity is, more than anything else, the retreat from controversiality. Tomorrow's art, if it is to be at all stirring, will no doubt be performed upon today's forbidden territory."

"The book is the clearest, most forceful statement on art by an artist of our time that I have read."

"I think that it can be said with certainty that the form which does emerge cannot be greater than the content which went into it. For form is only the manifestation, the shape of content."

"However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite another matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout."

"Whoever would know his day or would capture its essential character must maintain such a degree of detachment."

"The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo. The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern-which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament. That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved."

"There is a cliché that the artist is the person who best reflects his time. I am not ready to accept that definition of the artist, nor the idea that the art is best which best reflects its time. The function of the artist is a little more than to reflect; he has to refract, to set things off in another direction."

"Every artist would like to communicate, but often he fails to ask himself with whom he is trying to do it."

"I think the term "self-expression" ought to be forbidden. It's finished. A person, if he has a gram of honesty, naturally does nothing but express himself. Self-expression is as much part of the artist as teeth are to the dentist; it is part of his life, his work."

"I believe that the image I create must contain within it everything man concerns himself with: his hopes, his fears, his tears. And I find that a great deal of the imagery in use today precludes most of these concerns."

"I look upon my work as a craftsman. I am one of many who practice a craft. I am one of many who have beliefs and fears and hopes, and I want to incorporate those, with all the tools I have learned to use over many years, into what I will call a piece of work. But not a masterpiece-I'd be terrified of that. There is a tendency for the artist to take himself seriously. But if I ever sat down before a canvas with the feeling that I was now creating a masterpiece, I'd lay an egg."

"I am a painter; I am not a lecturer about art nor a scholar of art. It is my chosen role to paint pictures, not to talk about them."

"I would not ordinarily undertake a discussion of form in art, nor would I undertake a discussion of content. To me, they are inseparable. Form is formulation-the turning of content into a material entity, rendering a content accessible to others, giving it permanence, willing it to the race. Form is as varied as are the accidental meetings of nature. Form in art is as varied as idea itself. It is the visible shape of all man's growth; it is the living picture of his tribe at its most primitive, and of his civilization at its most sophisticated state. Form is the many faces of the legend-bardic, epic, sculptural, musical, pictorial, architectural; it is the infinite images of religion; it is the expression and the remnant of self. Form is the very shape of content."

"It is notoriously difficult to convey the proper impression of the frontiers of mathematics to nonspecialists. Ultimately the difficulty stems from the fact that mathematics is an easier subject than the other sciences. Consequently, many of the important primary problems of the subject‍—‌that is, problems which can be understood by an intelligent outsider‍—‌have either been solved or carried to a point where an indirect approach is clearly required. The great bulk of pure mathematical research is concerned with secondary, tertiary, or higher-order problem, the very statement of which can hardly be understood until one has mastered a great deal of technical mathematics."

"Early in his college days, Minsky had had the good fortune to encounter Andrew Gleason. Gleason was only six years older than Minsky, but he was already recognized as one of the world’s premier problem-solvers in mathematics; he seemed able to solve any well-formulated mathematics problem almost instantly... “I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could know so much mathematics,” Minsky told me. “But the most remarkable thing about him was his plan. When we were talking once, I asked him what he was doing. He told me that he was working on Hilbert’s fifth problem.” Gleason said he had a plan that consisted of three steps, each of which he thought would take him three years to work out. Our conversation must have taken place in 1947, when I was a sophomore. Well, the solution took him only about five more years... I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could understand the subject well enough to have such a plan and to have an estimate of the difficulty in filling in each of the steps. Now that I’m older, I still can’t understand it. Anyway, Gleason made me realize for the first time that mathematics was a landscape with discernible canyons and mountain passes, and things like that. In high school, I had seen mathematics simply as a bunch of skills that were fun to master—but I had never thought of it as a journey and a universe to explore. No one else I knew at that time had that vision, either."

"In the growth mindset, talent is something you build on and develop, not something you simply display to the world and try to coast to success on."

"In my research, I have identified two mindsets that people can have about their talents and abilities. Those with a fixed mindset believe that their talents and abilities are simply fixed. They have a certain amount and that’s that."

"People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, think of talents and abilities as things they can develop—as potentials that come to fruition through effort, practice, and instruction."

"The Kremlin has managed to get a candidate who’s very favorable to itself in the White House. It is still slightly hypothetical, because we don’t know the results of the investigation, but the fact that [the FBI] started an investigation at all, and this question had to be asked at all, shows how weird and unprecedented this situation is."