The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.
~ Jean-François Revel
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If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.
~ Arthur Koestler
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Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
~ John Steinbeck
[Twitter] @unibirmingham
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[web] www.birmingham.ac.uk
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The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.
~ Werner Heisenberg
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It is clear by now that the mental-health crisis has changed academia forever: its structures, its culture and the function it is expected to perform in American society. More than half of American college students now report depression, anxiety or seriously considering suicide. This is a problem that reaches across geography, race, class, identity, institutional resources or prestige and academic ability. Almost one in four Americans in college considered dropping out in the last year because of their mental health. Adjusting pedagogy to account for this scale of illness and, in some cases, disability, is the new frontier of postsecondary education.
~ Jordan Kisner via The New York Times Magazine
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The sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly.
~ Charles Dickens
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