Stanford University Alumni

"I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away."

"As for the coldness, I have never seen it like this. I mean, coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from."

"“The problem with English is this: You usually can't open your mouth and it comes out just like that--first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.”"

"“There are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.”"

"Until the Chinese are more cooperative with us in specific areas, maybe we’ve made a mistake in growing China into a great power when its hostility towards us is higher than we realized."

"I had not realized myself that it’s actually gotten worse. The Chinese treatment of the United States has gotten more unfair, if I can put it that way, than was the case three years ago when I wrote my book trying to sound the alarm."

"I'd say that getting started on research early as an undergraduate makes a big difference. If, like me, you don't come from a family background in this area, there are so many exciting things to work on that I knew little about. Undergraduate research upended my preconceived notions of what work in space research is like. I had no idea about what jobs even existed. Working in industry can also be a tremendously valuable experience. Systems engineering work provides a great overview of how spacecraft are built and operated, and seeing the teamwork and cameraderie is inspiring. Teamwork is essential to making missions work; it's like being part of a band or a sports team in that regard. A successful space mission represents hundreds or even thousands of people working together for a common goal, so building teamwork skills is a good idea."

"My family was always interested in nature, and that made me curious about it too – we liked to learn about birds and plants and rocks together. It was really fun! In every bird, plant, or rock, there’s a great story waiting to be learned – it’s like watching a really interesting movie or reading a great book. Now, as a professional scientist, it’s my job to learn things about nature. Every day is different from the next, and there’s always something wonderful to learn about the universe and the world around us."

"Every day there are new estimates coming out for the incubation period (of COVID-19)."

"Characters, even though they’re minor, shouldn’t be a device. No person should be a device to move the plot along. That’s when you run into problems with stereotypes. I strive, in my journalism and my fiction, to make characters as complex and complicated as they are in real life…"

"I think often, especially with immigrant narratives, or narratives from marginalized communities, there is room for only one narrative or that there’s only stereotypes or statistics. A River of Stars does kind of show that we do have different histories, dreams, flaws, and ambitions, and I hope people are able to really see the fullness of the humanity of each character, whether they’re major or minor."

"I think the American dream is still what gets us out of bed every day, that life can be better…"

"Fiction fosters empathy among readers by putting them in a position to consider deeply someone’s history, hopes, and ambitions…"

"What patients seek is not scientific knowledge doctors hide, but existential authenticity each must find on her own. Getting too deep into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability. I remember the moment when my overwhelming uneasiness yielded. Seven words from Samuel Beckett, a writer I’ve not even read that well, learned long ago as an undergraduate, began to repeat in my head, and the seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” I took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” And then, at some point, I was through. I am now almost exactly eight months from my . My strength has recovered substantially. In treatment, the cancer is retreating. I have gradually returned to work. I’m knocking the dust off scientific manuscripts. I’m writing more, seeing more, feeling more. Every morning at 5:30, as the alarm clock goes off, and my dead body awakes, my wife asleep next to me, I think again to myself: “I can’t go on.” And a minute later, I am in my , heading to the operating room, alive: “I’ll go on.”"

"I sat down by the computer to enter orders as the nurses cleaned and the s began to wake the patient. I had always jokingly threatened that when I was in charge, instead of the high-energy everyone liked to play in the , we’d listen exclusively to . I put “” on the radio, and the soft, sonorous sounds of a saxophone filled the room. I left the O.R. shortly after, then gathered my things, which had accumulated over seven years of work—extra sets of clothes for the nights you don’t leave, toothbrushes, bars of soap, phone chargers, snacks, my skull model and collection of neurosurgery books, and so on. On second thought, I left my books behind. They’d be of more use here."

"Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed."

"I don't know if I would say I'm an artist. [...] I would say that I'm a craftsman. I attempt to ply my trade in the best possible way. If occasionally something transcends the craft, then that's wonderful. [...] It doesn't happen very often."

"My father was an engineer and I intended to follow in his footsteps, but movies became my real passion. Careful planning is important in engineering, so I used that experience to focus on film preproduction. With the low budgets I had, I couldn't afford to have the cast and crew waiting around for days on a 10-day picture while I figured out how and what to shoot."

"[Asked why he never made a film like the art house titles his company distributed: I]t's an economic situation. All of those films were made in Europe with government subsidies. Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut did not have the necessity of having to earn their money back and so they were free to do what they liked. In the US it's different. It's a money-making industry, so that's what you have to do"

"It's not so much watching them but understanding how they were made – the preparation and willingness to deviate when necessary especially if you're on a low budget, I also took every film I made seriously and did my best on every one."

"We were shooting a Ku Klux Klan parade led by Bill [William Shatner], and he went through the black part of town in a parade of cars carrying crosses with the hoods, and then they burned the flaming cross. We shot late at night; I said, "Cut, print!" and everybody went, "Yeah, we're out of here!" Guys raced to their cars, the grips threw the last couple of things in the trucks and we just drove straight north."

"I come across as a very straightforward guy and that tends to surprise people [...] Clearly my subconscious mind must be some kind of boiling inferno."

"(W)hereas Milgram’s findings need constant reiteration in every generation, Harlow’s research no longer surprises us. One might say that its very success has made teaching it unnecessary: No one would argue against Harlow’s findings, as many students always want to do with Milgram’s."

"Because that's how it feels when you're depressed."

"Apathetic Annie was complacent and serene Though suffering from , and But Annie did not really care Though life was nearly gone For Annie had a tumor of the ."

"Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were."

"[Harlow] kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."

"The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys?"

"Harry Harlow and his colleagues go on torturing their nonhuman primates decade after decade, invariably proving what we all knew in advance: that social creatures can be destroyed by destroying their social ties."

"The effects of 6 months of total social isolation were so devastating and debilitating that we had assumed initially that 12 months of isolation would not produce any additional decrement. This assumption proved to be false; 12 months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially."

"Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned missions as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists."

"In our study of psychopathology, we began as sadists trying to produce abnormality. Today, we are psychiatrists trying to achieve normality and equanimity."

"In the first place I have an enormous regard for common sense. Any time we discover some great thing and it contradicts common sense, we better go back to the laboratory and check it."

"The mark of a capitalistic society is that resources are owned and allocated by such nongovernmental organizations as firms, households, and markets. Resource owners increase productivity through cooperative specialization and this leads to the demand for economic organizations which facilitate cooperation. When a lumber mill employs a cabinetmaker, cooperation between specialists is achieved within a firm, and when a cabinetmaker purchases wood from a lumberman, the cooperation takes place across markets (or between firms). Two important problems face a theory of economic organization—to explain the conditions that determine whether the gains from specialization and cooperative production can better be obtained within an organization like the firm, or across markets, and to explain the structure of the organization."

"The rights of individuals to the use of resources (i.e., property rights) in any society are to be construed as supported by the force of etiquette, social custom, ostracism, and formal legally enacted laws supported by the states' power of violence of punishment. Many of the constraints on the use of what we call private property involve the force of etiquette and social ostracism. The level of noise, the kind of clothes we wear, our intrusion on other people's privacy are restricted not merely by laws backed by police force, but by social acceptance, reciprocity, and voluntary social ostracism for violators of accepted codes of conduct."

"Like the biologist, the economist predicts the effects of environmental changes on the surviving class of living organisms; the economist need not assume that each participant is aware of, or acts according to, his cost and demand situation."

"The greater the uncertainties of the world, the greater is the possibility that profits would go to venturesome and lucky rather than to logical, careful, fact-gathering individuals."

"Neither perfect knowledge of the past nor complete awareness of the current state of the arts gives sufficient foresight to indicate profitable action. Even for this more restricted objective, the pervasive effects of uncertainty prevent the ascertainment of actions which are supposed to be optimal in achieving profits. Now the consequence of this is that modes of behavior replace optimum equilibrium conditions as guiding rules of action. Therefore, in the following sections two forms of conscious adaptive behavior are emphasized."

"By this I refer to the fact that at the same time several people may each possess some portion of the rights to use the land. A may possess the right to grow wheat on it. B may possess the right to walk across it. C may possess the right to dump ashes and smoke on it. D may possess the right to fly an airplane over it. E may have the right to subject it to vibrations consequent to the use of some neighboring equipment. And each of these rights may be transferable. In sum, private property rights to various partitioned uses of land are "owned" by different persons."

"Where foresight is uncertain, “profit maximization” is meaningless as a guide to specifiable action."

"Before condemning violence (physical force) as a means of social control, note that its threatened or actual use is widely practiced and respected—at least when applied successfully on a national scale. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and was honored by the Romans; had he simply roughed up the local residents, he would have been damned as a gangster. Alexander the Great, who conquered the Near East, was not regarded by the Greeks as a ruffian, nor was Charlemagne after he conquered Europe. Europeans acquired and divided—and redivided—America by force. Lenin is not regarded in Russia as a subversive. Nor is Spain’s Franco, Cuba’s Castro, Nigeria’s Gowon, Uganda’s Amin, China’s Mao, our George Washington."

"Alchian: Two things you [Hayek] wrote that had a personal influence on me, after your Prices and Production, were 'Individualism and Economic Order' [sic — Alchian certainly has in mind Hayek's 'Economics and Knowledge'] and 'The Use of Knowledge in Society.' These I would regard as your two best articles, best in terms of their influence on me. Hayek: 'Economics and Knowledge' — the '37 one — which is reprinted in the volume, is the one which marks the new look at things in my way. Alchian: It was new to you, too, then? Was it a change in your own thinking? Hayek: Yes, it was really the beginning of my looking at things in a new light. … I was aware that I was putting down things which were fairly well known in a new form, and perhaps it was the most exciting moment in my career when I saw it [i.e. 'Economics and Knowledge'] in print. Alchian: Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that, because I had that copy typed up to mimeograph for my students in the first course I gave here [i.e. UCLA]. And Allan Wallace … came through town one day, and I said, 'Allan, I've got a great article!" He looked at it, started to laugh, and said, "I've seen it too; it's just phenomenal!' I'm just delighted to hear you say that it was exciting, because it was to me, too … that was a very influential article, I must say."

"It is a general prevalence of double coincidence of information rather than wants by both parties that would avoid the use of money."

"I was a colleague of Armen's, at the Rand Corporation "think tank," during the 1950s, and hold no economist in higher regard. When I sat down at my keyboard just now it was to find out what happened to Armen's works. One Google response was someone saying that Armen should get a Nobel Prize. I concur. My own Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 1990 along with the prize for Wm. Sharpe. I see in Wikipedia that Armen "influenced" Bill, and that Armen is still alive and is 96 years old."

"I personally believe that economics is fun and valuable. People who say they found it a nightmare in college just didn't have a good teacher-professor. I became a good teacher-professor as a result of tenacious mentors during my graduate study at UCLA. Professor Armen Alchian, a very distinguished economist, used to give me a hard time in class. But one day, we were having a friendly chat during our department's weekly faculty/graduate student coffee hour, and he said, "Williams, the true test of whether someone understands his subject is whether he can explain it to someone who doesn't know a darn thing about it." That's a challenge I love: making economics fun and understandable."

"Alchian: Perhaps it might have been more appropriate for the Nobel Prize to have gone to you and Hicks together, and [Kenneth] Arrow and [[Gunnar Myrdal|[Gunnar] Myrdal]] together. Hayek: Oh, surely. [laughter]"

"BEHAVIORAL THEORIES OF THE FIRM: A turn from structure to internal processes was the theme of authors such as Richard Cyert and James March, Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn, and Karl Weick... All but one... was a psychologist by education, so it should not be surprising that their view of organization theory emphasizes internal processes and resembles the micro approach of organizational behavior. Another group of theorists, all but one educated as a sociologist, viewed organizations as a product of macro environmental forces. These behavioralists were Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik, Michael Hannan and John Freeman, and John Meyer and Richard Scott. Pfeffer (the only non-sociologist) and Salancik presented a resource-dependent theory that postulates that organizations require support from their external environment and can only survive to the extent that this support is forthcoming. Managers form coalitions to gather support in an open system of external relationships in which there are constraints that create either a munificent or scarce resource situation."

"In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy..."

"According to the resource dependence perspective, firms do not merely respond to external constraint and control through compliance to environmental demands. Rather, a variety of strategies may be undertaken to somehow alter the situation confronting the organization to make compliance less necessary."

"The theories in this chapter, focusing on the individual level of analysis, differ somewhat from those in the next chapter, in which a more organizational level of analysis is employed. Although all of the theories are essentially cognitive and social definitionist in nature, particularly as developed in the general sociological literature, there are at least two important subgroups within the social constructionist perspective."