Academic Quotes - page 4
Productivity-the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy-is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.s and finance ministers.
Tim Jackson
I went to a strict elementary school with nuns, and uniforms that I'm pretty sure were made out of sandpaper. It was an academic, sports-oriented place. I liked to read, and wanted to act, and didn't try out for volleyball. I was weird. The other girls would dip my hair in ink and stuff.
Zosia Mamet
We economists love to quote Keynes's final lines in his 1936 General Theory-for the reason that they cater so well to our vanity and self-importance. But to admit the truth, madmen in authority can self generate their own frenzies without needing help from either defunct or avant-garde economists. What establishment economists brew up is as often what the Prince and the Public are already wanting to imbibe. We guys don't stay in the best club by proffering the views of some past academic crank or academic sage.
Paul Samuelson
We must defend freedom of speech, which is the most important of our liberties. So long as we are free to speak, we can tell people the truth and make them realize what's at stake. The truth is our only weapon-we must use it. The West's political, academic, and media establishment are concealing the true scope of the Islamic threat. But the people sense they are not getting the whole story, and they are eager to know more. We must spread the message.
Geert Wilders
One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.
Robert A. Heinlein
An energetic crudity, even a riotous absurdity, has more promise in it than a clever and elegant mediocrity, because it shows that the young man is speaking out of his own heart, and struggling to express himself in his own way rather than in the way he finds in other men's books. The early works of original writers are usually very bad; then succeeds a short interval of imitation in which the influence of some favourite author is distinctly traceable; but this does not last long, the native independence of the mind reasserts itself, and although perhaps academic and critical demands are somewhat disregarded, so that the original writer on account of his very originality receives but slight recognition from the authorities, nevertheless if there is any real power in the voice it soon makes itself felt in the world.
George Henry Lewes
I shall not waste time on this theoretical stuff, which seems to me to be a secondhand version of the academic views of an Austrian professor-Friedrich August von Hayek-who is very popular just now with the Conservative Party. Any system can be reduced to absurdity by this kind of theoretical reasoning, just as German professors showed theoretically that British democracy must be beaten by German dictatorship. It was not.
Clement Attlee
By Suprematism, I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in the pictorial arts. From the Suprematist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling – in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked. Academic naturalism, the naturalism of the impressionists, of Cézannism, of Cubism, etc., are all so to speak nothing but dialectic methods, which in themselves in no way determine the true value of the work of art.
Kazimir Malevich
One interesting footnote: although Friedman made great strides in macroeconomics by applying the concept of individual rationality, he also knew where to stop. In the 1970s, some economists pushed Friedman's analysis of inflation even further, arguing that there is no usable trade-off between inflation and unemployment even in the short run, because people will anticipate government actions and build that anticipation, as well as past experience, into their price-setting and wage-bargaining. This doctrine, known as "rational expectations,” swept through much of academic economics. But Friedman never went there.
Paul Krugman
Consider John Kenneth Galbraith or Lester Thurow, both leading economists in the view of the general public, both with all the formal qualifications, both totally ignored by the academic mainstream. Or consider Robert Mundell, who is still revered for his contributions to international monetary theory, yet whose later incarnation as the father of supply-side economics has similarly been ignored.
Paul Krugman
The idea of comparative advantage-with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both-is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed.
Paul Krugman
No one has ever done one experiment to prove any phase of macro-evolution at all the effect that evolution has on science, I think is devastating. America is rapidly losing ground in the world market in our science students. We are turning out students that many other countries are able to beat in academic scores and academic knowledge because we waste so much class time and textbook time on this dumb idea of evolution.
Kent Hovind
