Harvard University Alumni

"Good evening. Today, an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The indictment was issued by a grand jury of citizens here in the District of Columbia and sets forth the crimes charged in detail. I encourage everyone to read it in full."

"This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin. The district court rejected respondent's claims, correctly recognizing that former Presidents are not above the law and are accountable for their violations of federal criminal law while in office. App., in- fra, 7a-38a, 46a-53a. Respondent's appeal of the ruling rejecting his immunity and related claims, however, suspends the trial of the charges against him, scheduled to begin on March 4, 2024. It is of imperative public importance that respondent's claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent's trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected. Respondent's claims are profoundly mistaken, as the district court held. But only this Court can definitively resolve them. The Court should grant a writ of certiorari before judgment to ensure that it can provide the expeditious resolution that this case warrants, just as it did in United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 686-687 (1974)."

"A study in Taiwan found that, despite education programs on menstruation at school, the boys in the sample had a significantly worse attitude toward menstruation than the girls. ... An older study from the United States showed that men tended to think the majority of menstrual symptoms occurred during the menstrual phase, whereas women reported that they occurred during the premenstrual phase. Men also tended to think periods were more emotionally debilitating but less physically bothersome than women. ..."

"The study of ovarian and endometrial functioning creates the opportunity to test questions regarding a trade-off that characterizes human pregnancy: close maternal-fetal contact to improve resource transmission, yet higher vulnerabilities to pathologies related to energetics and inflammation such as and choriodecidual inflammatory syndrome."

"Menstruation is a wild process that should captivate and delight. It offers up so many lessons in terms of how we understand bodily autonomy, sexual selection, even tissue engineering. It is strange, then, that instead of being something so fundamental to science education as Mendel's peas or dinosaur bones or the planets of our solar system, it gets at best a brief mention in health class."

"... as an adolescent ... from the world around me, I learned that must I hide all signs that I menstruated or face deep, crushing shame."

"A poem, a symphony, a painting, a mathematical truth, a new scientific fact, all bear in themselves all the justification that universities, colleges, and institutes of research need or require."

"In the face of the history of the human race what can be more silly or ridiculous than likes or dislikes founded upon race or religion?"

"Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources."

"Thus it becomes obvious that one must be wary in attributing scientific discovery wholly to any one person. Almost every discovery has a long and precarious history. Someone finds a bit here, another a bit there. A third step succeeds later and thus onward till a genius pieces the bits together and makes the decisive contribution."

"universe, at first chemical riddles, in later periods, physical riddles. As far as he cared, the question of utility was never raised. Any suspicion of utility would have restricted his restless curiosity. In the end, utility resulted, but it was never a criterion to which his ceaseless experimentation could be subjected."

"Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking."

"Any awareness of how lies spread must generate a real sensitivity to the fact that most lies believed to be white are unnecessary if not downright undesirable."

"The role that one assigns to truthfulness will always remain central in considering what kind of person one wants to be—how one wishes to treat, not only other people, but oneself."

"Although mortal, existential enemies, both Reds and Whites were united on one point: They wanted the boundaries of the Russia they hoped to control to be as wide as possible. Both sides had little but hatred for these non-Russian independence movements, especially the one in Ukraine, a land so rich in grain, iron, and coal."

"Evil means, he insisted, corrupt and degrade not only the purposes for which they are undertaken but also the persons who stoop to such means. Overcoming the urge to resort to such means is hardest when one aims to rectify past injustices. It is because ‘hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept so rarely practiced that the poison of hatred spreads in the world."

"When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe. We can do so through gesture, through disguise, by means of action or inaction, even through silence."

"Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity."

"Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives."

"Act only on the maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

"Vladimir Nabokov's father, a democratically minded politician who had been arrested by a Communist Red Guard, managed to escape and flee the country, but not before the family’s cook made him caviar sandwiches for the journey."

"As in all despotisms, power rested upon violence. In the eyes of the regime, Russian citizens were either loyal subjects who knelt to the ground when the czar passed or deadly enemies most likely bent on assassination. The idea of a space in between barely existed. Over the centuries, five czars were indeed stabbed, strangled, shot, or otherwise assassinated, as were several grand dukes and other high officials."

"In a nation so deeply xenophobic to begin with, the ultimately victorious Communists never forgot the foreign troops who had tried to strangle their baby in its cradle."

"Long before the civil war tore Russia apart, the challenges of holding such a huge country together, against threats without and centrifugal forces within, had been handled with widespread oppression as well as tight control from the top."

"Before the U.S.S.R.'s collapse, in 1991, its rulers portrayed that war starkly: The Whites were evil reactionaries who tried to delay the glorious triumph of Soviet rule. But Putin, whose passion is for empire, not communism, has a different view. He would love to restore the power of both czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, which extended over territory far larger than his own shrunken Russia of today."

"A less democratic regime than czarist Russia would be hard to imagine. Starting in the 17th century, serfdom enslaved a high proportion of the country’s citizens—a system maintained by whips, chains, the threat of separating families and exiling rebels to Siberia, and the massacre of tens of thousands of serfs who staged hundreds of revolts over the years."

"One more aspect of the Russian Civil War reverberates directly with the conflict we are now watching play out. The war was not just about who would rule Russia, but about whom Russia would rule."

"In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag."

"Outlying areas of the old Russian empire took advantage of the Red-White struggle to battle for independence. Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states did so successfully, Ukraine unsuccessfully. The fighting in the latter, among Reds, Whites, and several rival Ukrainian forces, convulsed cities in the headlines today: Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol."

"Honesty from health professionals matters more to patients than almost everything else that they experience when ill."

"It is impossible to watch Vladimir Putin's arrogant invasion of Ukraine without being appalled by its savagery. Dead men and women strewn on the streets of Bucha, hands bound behind their backs. Russian soldiers raping women, sometimes in front of husbands or children. Russians seizing loot of every size, from cellphones to giant John Deere wheat-harvesting combines. And, again and again, testimony about torture: beatings, electric shocks, near suffocation with plastic bags."

"From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder."

"It is always tempting to believe that a bad system is the fault of one bad man."

"[T]o fight a complex, mechanized war, a disciplined army responsible to a central command is far more effective than a range of militias reporting to a crazy quilt of political parties and trade unions."

"In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history."

"Furthermore, unlike many other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.(Introduction, page 4)"

"The movement's other great achievement is this. Among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth."

"I realized something else about the terror in the Congo and the controversy that came to surround it. It was the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera. In its mixture of bloodshed on an industrial scale, royalty, sex, the power of celebrity, and rival lobbying media campaigns in half a dozen countries, it seemed strikingly close to our own time. (Introduction, page 4)"

"I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?"

"You never meet anything mean or cruel in music. I’d like to be able to play Bach before they they blow up the world. I’d like to be at the keyboard when they do it."

"After three and a half centuries I have found, for an empirical ethics, no better starting axiom than this: cruelty and evil are virtually synonyms. Human ethical teachers have insisted over the ages that a cruel act is an evil act, and men on the whole endorse the doctrine no matter how repeatedly they violate it. There is inevitable revulsion against any blatant attempt to make cruelty a law of behavior."

"They measure rank as Mussolini did, by the amount of carpet between door and desk."

"I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them."

"“You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?” “Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?” “Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it—that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it—devil-worship—but never will they respect it except superstitiously.”"

"“Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.”"

"Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truths. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim."

"Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?"

"“And where is your guarantee against war in that, Miles?” “There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic—the rest is mechanics.”"

"In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl."

"A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods—at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves."