When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.
~ William Deresiewicz
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Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.
~ Toni Morrison
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A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.
~ Otto von Bismarck
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In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.
~ Ludwig von Mises
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Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?
~ Iain Banks
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Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
― Walter Benjamin
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We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.
~ Audre Lorde
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A curious feature of Franz Kafka’s prose is that, pared down though its lexicon may be, it resists translation. There’s a good reason for that. Dictionaries supply more definitions for basic words than for those of greater complexity because simpler ones are the roots of vast family trees of words; plain language signifies promiscuously.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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