Scholarship Quotes - page 8
If only the specialist is to be allowed access to these books, on the ground that it is impossible to understand them without "scholarship," ... then we shall be compelled to shut out the majority of mankind from some of the finest creations of the human mind. This is aristocracy with a vengeance.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
Eric Hoffer
However, there are all kinds of Writers. Some who know only one field themselves. Next those who know two or three fields in depth, and nothing more, and thirdly the majority who know a little about many things. Lin Yutang says, "It seems to me that simplicity is almost the most difficult thing to achieve in scholarship or writing," presumably because simplicity pre-supposes digestion and also maturity.
Peter de Noronha
Thus, Grünendahl has noted Pollock's tendency to develop broad narratives without any supporting evidence. Moreover, he draws attention to Pollock's messianism in promoting American scholarship...., casting doubt on Pollock's attempt to analyse Sanskrit objectively. He raises the pertinent question as to whether Pollock is providing the intellectual foundations for America's 'New Raj', to replace the dead British Raj - i.e., whether American imperialism is replacing the dead British imperialism.
Rajiv Malhotra
I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family's life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family's life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.
Richard Rodriguez
I was glad to get away from those students when I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in London. I found myself in the British Museum, at first content, reading English Renaissance literature. But then came the crisis: the domed silence; the dusty pages of books all around me; the days accumulating in lists of obsequious footnotes; the wandering doubts about the value of scholarship. My year in Britain came to an end and I rushed to ‘come home.' Then quickly discovered that I could not. Could not cast off the culture I had assumed. Living with my parents for the summer, I remained an academic-a kind of anthropologist in the family kitchen, searching for evidence of our ‘cultural ties' as we ate dinner together.
Richard Rodriguez
Bookish academics need to remember that when it comes to analyzing works regarded as sacred by vast numbers of people, sound scholarship is like the firmness of bones, while appreciation and sensitivity are like flesh and blood. Without the latter, the former is merely an ugly skeleton: morbid and monstrous, lifeless and lamentable. With the latter, scholarship becomes robust and living.
Varadaraja V. Raman
This book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher Rudolf Bultmann. He encouraged me more than thirty years ago to deal more intensively with the extra-canonical writings from the early Christian period. His unwavering insistence upon the consistent application of the historical-critical method and his emphasis upon the investigation of early Christian literature in the context of the history of religions must remain basic commitments of New Testament scholarship.
Helmut Koester
But the parallels go further, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians after their subordination to others and emigration or expulsion from their original homelands became Diaspora ethno-religious communities cultivating the particular virtues and aptitudes of their traditions. These included a respect for scholarship and learning, derived from constant study of sacred texts (and in the Greek case some of their ancient secular texts seen through religious filters); and hence a generally high status accorded to religious scholars and clergy within each enclave. Allied to this was a marked aptitude for literary expression-poetic, philosophical, legal, liturgical, linguistic, and historical.
Anthony D. Smith
Now of course, the idealistic slogans are still needed for the media, for a lot of scholarship, for the schools, and so on. But, where the serious people are, the problem is that we have to maintain this disparity, and obviously it's gotta be maintained by force. So none of the idealistic slogans at home. So when you're setting up death squads in El Salvador under the Alliance for Progress, you're not hampered by these idealistic slogans. That's for the masses, for us. Well, given this kind of thinking, it's not too surprising that President Kennedy should say, with regard to El Salvador after supporting a military coup there, that "Governments of the civil-military type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing communist penetration in Latin America." This at the time when he organized the basic framework for the death squads that have been torturing and murdering ever since, and which we attribute to some kind of extreme right-wingers who somehow we can't get under control.
Noam Chomsky
I can testify from personal experience to the immense stimulus and direction which Hayek's migration to this country [Great Britain] gave to economic research in the 1930s, not only in London and economics faculties throughout the United Kingdom, but also in the international world of scholarship.
Friedrich Hayek
When in 1998, the new BJP Government nominated people of its own choice to the Indian Council of Historical Research, a roar of indignation went up among Indian Marxists against this "politicization of scholarship”, highlighting to the alert observer the extent to which the Marxists themselves had treated the ICHR as their own playground, and how, like spoilt children, they couldn't stand losing it.
Koenraad Elst
Future historians will include the no-temple argument of the 1990s as a remarkable case study in their surveys of academic fraud and politicized scholarship. With academic, institutional and media power, a new academic-journalistic consensus has been manufactured denying the well-established history of temple demolition by Islamic iconoclasm to the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi site; at least among people with prestige and influence but no firsthand knowledge of the issue. But the facts will remain the facts, and their ongoing suppression is bound to give way as new generations of scholars take a fresh look at the data.
Koenraad Elst
A good side-effect of the Ayodhya dispute has been the increased awareness about the ongoing debate over Indian history-writing. The "eminent historians” have been complaining that the writers of evidence-based history are polluting the stream of history scholarship. Those who are too remote from the available sources or not intellectually equipped or simply too lazy to verify these claims may well be taken in by this allegation. Those who care to inquire, however, are bound to find that it the other way around: it is the "eminent historians” who have polluted the channels of history teaching with their systematic distortions.
Koenraad Elst
To think highly of the academic world presupposes a link between scientific achievement and academic rank, and this largely makes sense in the exact sciences. In the humanities, especially in the social "science” and literature departments, this link is also deduced, but only as a parasitical extension of the conventions in the exact sciences. Much of what passes for scholarship these days is only ideology wrapped into jargon. Some sophomores take it seriously: having just gained entry into the academic world, they idealize it and are proud of their belonging to a higher world distinct from lay society. And most laymen believe it: over-awed by status, they assume that academic status presupposes both knowledge and objectivity, the basis of academic authority.
Koenraad Elst
