December 2012
1 post
“Something has gone terribly wrong,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat...”
– Jennifer Steinhauer, “A Showdown Long Foreseen,” New York Times, December 31, 2012.
.
July 2012
1 post
“It is through spatial structures that mental structures take shape.”
– Pierre Bourdieu, quoted in Françoise Gaspard, A Small City in France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 60.
March 2012
3 posts
“The point of submitting a piece of writing to the scrutiny of another is that...”
– Carol Saller, “Are You a Difficult Writer?”, Lingua Franca, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2012.
“The contraction of the public imagination preceded the Tea Party and opened the...”
– Daniel T. Rodgers, “‘Moocher Class’ Warfare: How four decades of radical individualism diminished society and gave rise to the Tea Party,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 24 (Spring 2012), p. 3.
“The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York or...”
– Ian Buruma, “A New Idea of Truth,” Aljazeera English, March 12, 2012
February 2012
1 post
“It should go without saying that any education worthy of the name teaches...”
– Gary Younge, “Replacing History with Fiction in Arizona,” The Nation, February 27, 2012, and at http://www.thenation.com/article/166140/replacing-history-fiction-arizona.
September 2011
3 posts
“Every time Congress takes a step to protect consumers, the banks use it as an...”
– Mallory Duncan, general counsel for the National Retail Federation, in Ylan Q. Mui, “Bank of America to add $5 monthly debit card fee as era of low-cost banking ebbs,” The Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2011.
April 2011
2 posts
4 tags
“Today’s radical conservatism is an unholy and unstable hodgepodge of ideas that...”
– Susan Brooks Thislethwaite, “The Gospel according to Ayn Rand,” On Faith, The Washington Post, April 18, 2011.
3 tags
“Collectively, the past month served as a reminder that a piece of hardware...”
– Andy Ihnatko, “To upgrade, or not?” Macworld.com, April 17, 2011. Too trivial to commonplace on this tumblelog? I think not. So much of our lives is bound up in such objects that it is important to step back and look at the conversation, or at least snippets from it—like the previous...
March 2011
2 posts
3 tags
“Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward.”
– Pamela Paul, “Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” New York Times, 18 March 2011.
2 tags
“Broadly construed, digital humanities is the use of digital media and technology...”
– Dan Cohen, “Defining Digital Humanities, Briefly,” on his blog, Dan Cohen, 9 March 2011. See also the interesting comment by Alan Shapiro about “reversing the term.”
February 2011
1 post
2 tags
“If, in the achievement of knowledge and the recognition of that knowledge...”
– Nick Lowery, interview with Lisa Furlong, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Jan/Feb 2011, p. 96.
November 2010
2 posts
2 tags
“[E]mbracing an interest in the learning of a second language doesn’t weaken a...”
– Francisco Marmolejo, “Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U.S. Educational System?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 9, 2010.
“The mind of the demagogue is a foreign country. It has a strange culture,...”
– Richard Cohen, “Sarah Palin: Ms. Conspiracy for president?,” The Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2010.
August 2010
5 posts
2 tags
“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to...”
– Simone Weil, “The Iliad” or “The Poem of Force” (1940), quoted in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 21.
3 tags
“[M]an … is moulded by society just as effectively as society is moulded by...”
– Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 39, 57–58.
2 tags
“Whenever historians and social scientists talk about the military as a...”
– Michael Geyer, “The Past as Future: The German Officer Corps as Profession,” in German Professions, 1800-1950, ed. Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 183.
“There’s always an ROF (Return on Failure) when you try to simplify—which...”
– John Maeda, Laws of Simplicity, 83.
“The practice of education is the highest form of intellectual philanthropy.”
– John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 36.
June 2010
2 posts
3 tags
“Dig out the syllabi for your next English courses and add one or (if you want to...”
– Cathy N. Davidson, “Research is Teaching,” HASTAC, June 28, 2010
3 tags
“When Blair or Bush offered Churchillian echoes [in 2003], it was presumably not...”
– Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (New York: Routledge, 2004), 242.
April 2010
1 post
“The enormous dynamism of modern capitalism poses a fundamental dilemma: How can...”
– Hartmut Berghoff, “Civilizing Capitalism? The Beginnings of Credit Rating in the United States and Germany,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 45 (Fall 2009), 9.
March 2010
1 post
1 tag
“The fact that we can’t get clear condemnation of death threats against...”
– John Avlon, quoted by Kenneth P. Vogel and Jake Sherman, “New partisan clash — most victimized,” Politico, 3/30/2010.
February 2010
1 post
“There should be a special place in hell for the professors who—at the end of an...”
– Thomas H. Benton, “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 8, 2010.
January 2010
4 posts
“I can’t help but fear that the open web wave has crested, and what we are...”
– Brian Lamb talking about some unfortunate choices Apple has signaled with its iPad, “They said it …” abject learning, January 28, 2010.
“Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and source...”
– Alain de Botton, “The Enlightening Bridge Between Art And Work,” NPR, Jan 12, 2009, quoted in boingboing. Hat tip: @robotnik; see also his second tweet.
“Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find this...”
– Tom Hodgkinson, “With friends like these …” guardian.co.uk, Jan. 14, 2008. Hat tip: @academicdave.
1 tag
“I don’t want a digital facelift for the humanities, I want the digital to...”
– academHacK, “The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities,” Jan. 6, 2010.
November 2009
2 posts
2 tags
“Everything one needs to know to use the language clearly, correctly, and even...”
– Art Scheck, “Old Books, Old Stories,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 12, 2009.
1 tag
“There must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything....”
– Confucius, quoted in Andrew Higgins and Anne E. Kornblut, “Ties that bind, and labels to keep in mind,” Washington Post Nov. 12, 2009, p. A10.
October 2009
1 post
“Inspired by NYT story of reading a book a day for a year, I hereby commit to...”
– Dan Cohen in a tweet about “A Quest to Read a Book a Day for 365 Days”. This is tongue in cheek, of course, because Cohen is a historian. Still, it’s hard to find time to read, which explains the lack of quotes here recently.
September 2009
1 post
3 tags
“The city is the diplomatic equivalent of the bar scene in the first Star Wars....”
– Jim Krane writing about Dubai in “American Nuclear Reactors for Dubai, Iran’s Best Friend,” Informed Comment, 8 Sept. 2009.
August 2009
9 posts
2 tags
“Major news organizations need to cover hate the way they once did — as a...”
– Charles Davis, “Unhealthy silence: Best way to beat hatemongering is to report it,” Columbia Daily Tribune, Aug. 18, 2009
2 tags
“When you lose Walmart for being too crazy-rightwing, you’re just plain too...”
– Wisco of Griper News regarding Walmart’s dropping its support for Glen Beck’s show on Fox.
2 tags
“In order to be fair, we will alternate questions between the badly misinformed,...”
– Announcement at a town hall meeting on health care; political Cartoon by Wassermann, The Boston Globe, reprinted in The Washington Post, August 15, 2009, p. A17.
1 tag
“I don’t find Canadians particularly scary, but I guess some of the...”
– Barrack Obama displaying his wry humor in connection with health care reform, as quoted by Carol E. Lee, “President Obama: Immigration bill coming this year,” Politico, Aug. 10, 2009.
2 tags
“There’s a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know...”
– Bill Maher, “New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country,” Huffington Post, 8/7/2009
2 tags
“At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his...”
– Bill Maher, “New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country,” Huffington Post, 8/7/2009 [hat tip]
2 tags
“There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also...”
– Hartley Shawcross, quoted in Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945–45: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 88.
3 tags
“Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate...”
– Ian Shapira, “The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition),” The Washington Post, August 2, 2009.
1 tag
“We must establish incredible events by credible evidence.”
– Robert H. Jackson on June 6, 1945 in a report to the president as the allies moved towards trying Nazis for criminal behavior, quoted in Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945–46 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 42.
July 2009
5 posts
1 tag
“What most people would view as truly bizarre, conspiracy theorists find...”
– Liz Halloran, “Why Do Doubts About Obama’s Birthplace Persist?,” NPR, July 29, 2009
1 tag
“Evidence … has been proved to feed conspiracies, rather than kill them.”
– Liz Halloran, “Why Do Doubts About Obama’s Birthplace Persist?,” NPR, July 29, 2009
1 tag
“Here chivalry disappeared for always. Like all noble and personal feelings it...”
– Ernst Jünger, quoted in Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 144.
1 tag
“Nothing could be less conservative than to fight for forms which in the course...”
– Wilhelm von Kardorff, quoted in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989; Boston: Mariner, 2000), 72.
1 tag
“Countries acquired colonies before World War I much the same way they acquired...”
– Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Aoudoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 13.
June 2009
5 posts
2 tags
“It should not be necessary to argue that the model of a natural and...”
– E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (Feb. 1971): 76–136, quote on 91.
1 tag
“If a man doesn’t get his due in one world, he can always get it in...”
– Voltaire, Candide, trans. and ed. by Daniel Gordon (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), ch. 14, p. 68. 