Throughout most of history, religious institutions were able to impose pro-fertility norms. But the causal relationship is reciprocal and the dominant direction can be reversed: if pro-fertility norms come to be seen as outmoded and repressive, their rejection also brings rejection of religion.
~ Ronald Inglehart
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Narratives do a lot to drive what our world looks like. They shape how we see ourselves, how we see our fellow citizens, how our elected officials see us—and what they do in reaction to those narratives can have far-reaching consequences.
~ Jerusalem Demsas via The Atlantic
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Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
~ Milan Kundera
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A few first rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half-finished.
~ Claude Shannon
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Franz Kafka’s stories are Jewish the way the Old Testament is Jewish. That is, it’s also Christian, and it speaks even more generally to the human condition, and to a great deal besides that.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.
~ Jenny Odell
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One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.
~ Clark Kerr
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If you’ve taken a college tour lately, either as an applicant or as the parent of an applicant, you may have noticed that at some point—usually as you’re on the death march from the aquatic center to the natural-sciences complex—the tour guide will spin smartly on her heel, do the college-tour-guide thing of performatively walking backwards, and let you in on something very important. “What’s different about College X,” she’ll say confidently, “is that our professors don’t teach you what to think. They teach you how to think.”
~ Caitlin Flanagan via The Atlantic
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A teacher should never do your thinking for you. She should give you texts to read and guide you along the path of making sense of them for yourself. She should introduce you to the books and essays of writers who disagree with one another and ask you to determine whose case is better.
~ Caitlin Flanagan via The Atlantic
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When asked what was the greatest political fact of modern times, Bismarck is reported to have responded, that it was “the inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English.”
~ George Louis Beer
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