Columbia University Alumni

"The history of the black man on the frontier – and, indeed, the history of the Indian – has never really been paid attention to in the movies."

"I don’t think being a celebrity or being anything else overrides the responsibility to be a decent, humane citizen"

"I had a sense of certainty that no matter how dark it is now, one of these days it'll change."

"Performing artists are less political today than they were years ago because they're not called on to be political"

"Blacks are by and large are still, in a majority sense, Democrats"

"We knew that if we lived within those parameters there was a world, that was really to some degree a safe world, and a world that provided us, reaffirmed us as to whom we were because it was a black world"

"If you can’t outfight the man, outsmart him"

"There is a lot of American history waiting to be rediscovered, once you get away from the official version"

"Optimism is small and personal"

"The struggle and the arts are connected almost by definition"

"One of the traps we've tried to avoid is the presentation of ourselves as victims or beggars"

"We're going somewhere, even if it's only around the Goddamn corner"

"It was a tradition that had gone all the way back into slavery, as long as we knew ourselves, we knew this as a part of the world in which we lived. We related to it on an individual basis, as it happened, we related to the incidents."

"in the end it is history that will tell the story"

"I come together to say, I choose to live for brotherhood and not for folly. I choose peace and not war. I choose life and not death."

"We have freedom. What we don't have is equality!"

"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."

"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph."

"If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t have to lug a camera."

"…New York City designated a portion of Manhattan’s 34th Street Ernst Jaakson Way, thereby posthumously honoring an Estonian diplomat who embodied the principle that force alone is not sufficient to destroy a state if its people and the leaders of the international community refuse to accept such actions. Jaakson (1905-1998) joined the Estonian foreign service at the age of 14 as a translator for the Estonian ambassador in Riga and then worked as a diplomat in the United States, first as a consular official and near the end of his life as ambassador to the US and permanent representative to the United Nations."

"The greater part of your misogamy is venal; the other cause of your invective humbug is that you're a muggish homuncle who couldn't raise a flickering ember in a vagabond-laced mutton."

"Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male."

"Let the bard from Smyrna catalogue Harma, the ledges and caves of Thaca, the milk-fed damsels of Achaia, pigeon-flocked Thisbe or the woods of Onchestus, I sing of Oak, Walnut, Chesnut, Maple and Elm Streets."

"Nobody heard her tears; the heart is a fountain of weeping water which makes no noise in the world."

"Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice."

"There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment."

"When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels."

"What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore."

"Nobody ever overcomes the phantasms of his childhood. The man is the corrupt dream of the child, and since there is only decay, and no time, what we call days and evenings are the false angels of our existence. There is nothing except sleep and the moon between the boy and the man; dogs dream and bay the moon, who is the mother of the unconscious. Sorrow and pleasure are the stuff of dreams and the energies of myriads of planets. What is the space between the boy and the man? Did the child who is now the man ever live? Did Christ exist and was Brutus at Philippi? The centuries that divide one from Jesus and Brutus contain no time. We still hear the tinkling of the sheep bells at Mamre, and Abraham continues to sleep beneath the terebinths just as Saul sits and broods underneath a tamarisk—but all these are "thoughts of the visions of the night.""

"When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as my bad demons do—and I see again her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah."

"For the first time, we have a critical mass of American Muslim women who are pioneering American Muslim culture"

"And so I believed,that these limitations were prescribed by Islam, and as a good Muslim girl, I should comply. The reward would be a picture-perfect life, which meant good grades, getting into a great college, marrying a wonderful man, having a baby within two years and then pursuing graduate school. I lived that illusion for many years."

"There wasn’t a collection of American Muslim women’s writings across ethnic and ideological lines, These women don’t remember a time when they weren’t both American and Muslim, much unlike our parents, who were raised in other countries or in other faith traditions."

"The ground was thawed to a depth of thirty centimeters. For the rough work of clearing the ground the men used spades and a pickaxe, but as soon as the real excavation began produced the geological spades with little blades, which were better for the more delicate work."

"I saw several dogskins hung up to dry. On account of the scarcity of and s, the have to use dogskins for their winter furs. The dogs have fine thick fur, but nothing to compare with that of bears and caribou."

"While in we made four camping trips with and outboard motor, visiting Alaganik on the and sites in the Sound from to . The gave us several lifts, and in August the took us for a ten-day cruise around the Sound, stopping at , , , and other villages where we had an opportunity to talk to the natives, and also touching at a few of the ancient village sites on our route."

"is a in a plain of partly indurated sands and clays of age, known as the ."

"There are a number of ways in which archeology may relate to , but in any given area it may not be possible to trace such connections fully. Ideally, of course, the archeology of a people should enable the to trace the record of the culture back into the stages temporally prior to those which can be explored through ethnological techniques or historical records. Admittedly the archeological data, even under conditions of maximum preservation and most skillful excavation, will never give the complete outline of a culture. At best the picture would be equivalent to that which the ethnologist might see if he visited a village from which the inhabitants had precipitately fled, abandoning all their possessions. But such a complete inventory of material items, in associations reflecting technological processes, economic activities, social organization and other nonmaterial aspects of life, is something to which the archeologist may aspire in vain."

"The contemporary left stands for the global, the individual—for liberalism and multiculturalism and even the postnational, i.e., a world which in fact is closer to the ideology of neoliberalism. A major shift here is the shift from class to culture as the heart of struggle. The working class, or what is left of it, is now considered to be reactionary and racist and it is the new bourgeoisie, the “latte left,” that bears the revolutionary struggle. But of course there is no revolutionary struggle; the latte left is the defender of the status quo."

"No matter what the vagaries of the culture concept, the idea that people live in meaningful structured worlds has been common to both European and American anthropologies... If there are no such collective structures, then anthropology can be replaced by psychology or at best social psychology and we are back to Tarde versus Durkheim, but this time to reverse the course of intellectual history. All of this is the result of reducing culture to individually held substance."

"Courage is like — it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging."

"In those days, it was common for a woman to be addressed as ‘Miss’ even though she had earned a Ph.D. degree."

"Rockefeller, where she worked for seven years, was an “awesome and inspiring” place to be."

"Consider the origins of beauty and you soon realize that it is a triumph of accident. Be it human or art, the chances are its parents were toxic waste."

"Because I was of African descent, that unless I could afford to go to Europe for final 'polishing' in my music, I would probably end up singing in a cabaret in America. If I chose science, my chances were better for a good future."

"Who, in your view, should have the power to draw the line between a “lie” and “free speech”? Government officials that want to stay in political power or the people that can hold them accountable ?"

"We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation, if there’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their license in to the FCC. .. This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest. .. The FCC could make a strong argument that this is sort of an intentional effort to mislead the American people about a very core fundamental fact, a very important matter. .. Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it's time for them to step up and say this, you know, garbage to the extent that that's what comes down the pipe in the future isn't something that we think serves the needs of our local communities. But, but this sort of status quo is obviously not, not acceptable where we are."

"When you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel, um, it appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible. Uh, as you've indicated, there are, y'know, avenues here for the FCC so there are some ways in which I need to be a little bit, uh, careful: because we could be called ultimately to be a judge on some of these claims that come up. But I don't think this is an isolated incident. You go back to Representative Swalwell, he had a tweet out last week, where he was saying that, y'know, emphasizing that Charlie Kirk's killer was "a straight white male from Republican family that voted for Donald Trump." In some quarters there's a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people.about the nature, as you indicated, one of the most significant, uh, newsworthy public interest acts that we've seen in a long time. In what appears to be an action by Jimmy Kimmel to play into that narrative that this was somehow a MAGA or Republican motivated person. If that's what happened here with his conduct, that's really really sick."

"The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the “public interest.”"

"There's actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. It's long past the time that...Comcast and Disney say 'We're not gonna run Kimmel anymore...because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibly of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC."