There are many who say things better than I do. It seems to me that I’ve known that forever, and have a long ingrained habit of keeping the thoughts and words of others that I most admire in several thousand books on my library shelves where I can look at them, read the spines, be [...]
Archive for the ‘Quotations’ category
Reason and Common Sense, One
March 10, 2010Would that I had come earlier to the United States!
February 3, 2010Columbia University’s Pierre-André Chiappori, as cited by Guy Sorman in the City Journal, says: “Academic life in the U.S. is determined by competition at all levels, he adds. ‘It’s often said that American universities recruit only the best among the Europeans. I would say instead that we become better because we are immersed in permanent [...]
I wonder if our President reads Thomas Friedman
January 17, 2010Thomas Friedman has no need of me to call attention to his op ed pieces. He has a readership. I have none. Nevertheless today he speaks exactly my mind (and I suppose that of many others). When he says this in today’s Times: “Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way [...]
Thomas Frank: The Left Should reclaim ‘Freedom’
September 16, 2009Now this from the Wall Street Journal’s Thomas Frank. Another reasonable voice, this one on the Right. There are few things in politics more annoying than the right’s utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word “freedom” that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital [...]
Salman Rushdie’s words at the end of his 2002 Tanner Lecture
September 11, 2009We are living, I believe, in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed. On the plus side, the end of the cold war, the revolution in communications technology, great scientific achievements such as the completion of the human genome project; [...]
Talk to Americans like adults
July 10, 2009Today in op ed piece in the N Y Times Paul Krugman said this: “What Obama needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.” Could be.
Mortimer Adler on Multiculturalism
June 28, 2009“The world, certainly, is multicultural, and so we should be taught about its cultural diversity. But this, it seems to me, is the time to ask whether society as a whole or its educational institutions should be multicultural in all respects, or only in some. If only in some, I propose that the word transculturalism [...]
Khomeini/Khamenei, lest we forget
June 28, 2009During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as [...]
“…grinding mankind to dust.”
June 8, 2009“For [Obama's] beloved middle ground is elusive, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. As Updike noted in 1966, ‘It is in middles that extremes clash.’ “Or, as he wrote 40 years later in ‘Terrorist,’ ‘History is a machine perpetually grinding mankind to dust.’ Our hopes, not least.” (Roger Cohen, writing in the New [...]
Optimism goes away but hope remains.
May 22, 2009In an interview published in The Journal of American History in March of 1994, the historian and social critic, Christopher Lasch, had this to say in response to a question about the distinction he made between hope and optimism. [Lasch was interviewed by two of his former graduate students in the summer of 1993. At [...]
