Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.
Diversity and inclusion of women and underrepresented minorities in science should not affect the way education is handled or research is carried out. So diversity should not be a problem but rather an opportunity to involve a large talent pool.
When I came to M.I.T. in 1960, only 4 percent of the students were female. Today, it's about 40 percent of undergraduates. At Lincoln Lab, they had 1,000 men and two women. But we had a very good boss, and he treated us just like everybody else.
More information and more communications foster world peace and understanding. But connecting extremist nut cases together on the Web - whatever flavor extremism they are - is a really bad thing. More information may not be a good thing, either.
You need companies investing in these countries, so women have employment opportunities, and you also need these forces of conscience. Without the activists, in the United States we would still have child labor, we would still have 16-hour days.
Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.
The factor that frequently determines whether people are going to make a particular choice is not the factor that counsels wisely or the one that leads to the greatest economic benefit. It's the one that's top of the consciousness in the moment.
We could curtail private spending by several trillion dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. That would be more than enough to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and eliminate government indebtedness once and for all.
I came to the United States because I valued living as a free person, one who is able to advocate in a democratic society. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been turning into a less free society, a police and surveillance state, especially after 9/11.
Technology challenges us to look at our human values. We can try to use technology to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, which would be a blessing, but that blessing is not a reason to move from artificial brain enhancement to artificial intimacy.
My problems are sort of more on a nuisance level. I can't stand scratchy clothes, I've got to have soft kinds of cotton against my skin, and I don't know why some 100% cotton t-shirts itch and others don't; it has something to do with the weave.
The challenge is that if you stimulate your immune system, it might get over-stimulated. And it might actually start causing harm to normal cells in your body. So we have to work a balance between attacking the cancer and not attacking yourself.
Climate change has a very high procrastination penalty that just grows with each passing year of inaction - rather like what happens if you don't pay off your credit card. But for climate, there is no such thing as a fresh start from bankruptcy.
I see a minimum living wage as a long-term solution, but I'm not sure that's my favorite. I think society benefits if all the human race is empowered and aspiring to do great things. Giving people the skill sets to do great things will take work.
The challenge is for bioethicists to position themselves to be on panels, boards and other decision making bodies where oublic policy positions wil be established-where the exploding changes in health care that are now underway will be addressed.
Where we're coming down is we currently have $787 billion of stimulus that's been passed. We're certainly focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that's absolutely the right strategy.
In a lot of Western science fiction, you need some form of conflict, whether it's aliens or robots. I think in Western culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you'll see a lot of fear of creating something that goes out of control.
The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, His grace is too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, His gospel is too easy, and His Christ is too common.
This idea that we should be best friends with our partner of the opposite gender leads toward tremendous frustration. Did you ever notice that while men often refer to their wives as best friends, women usually refer to another woman in that way?
People who study the way religions develop have shown that if you have a charismatic teacher, and you don't have an institution develop around that teacher within about a generation to transmit succession within the group, the movement just dies.
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children. Between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.
I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It's a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.
The Bible was written not to satisfy your curiosity but to help you conform to Christ's image. Not to make you a smarter sinner but to make you like the Saviour. Not to fill your head with a collection of biblicalfacts but to transform your life.
From a population point of view, it's actually very important that as few people as possible get the flu. People getting the flu is not a private matter. The risk for healthy people is really about your friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.
Why are oil prices so low? First, energy consumption growth rates in developing markets have decreased. This is particularly noticeable in China. Second, new technologies are being developed and the shale gas revolution in the USA has taken place
Sola scriptura means at least this: that the church's proclamation is always subject to potential correction from the canon. It is for this reason that we resist simply collapsing the text into the tradition of its interpretation and performance.
Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.'
I believe it is possible to bring an end to mass incarceration and birth a new moral consensus about how we ought to be responding to poor folks of color and a consensus in support of basic human rights for all. But it is going to take some work.
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives...most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity...when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
Elections themselves do not necessarily lead to more corporate uncertainty - quite the reverse, stable democracies create a reliable environment. And elections have caused hardly any change in the basic economic framework in the last few decades.
When I write I'll sometimes say things which are somewhat controversial - not because I'm seeking out controversy for its own sake, but if I don't have anything to say which is different, why am I bothering to write stuff down in the first place?
I kind of like social media, and I like hearing from people. I don't like the ugly stuff, but there are some people - smart people - who have a very different perspective, and I'll get a backlash from them. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.
The ambiguous, gray areas of authority and responsibility between parents and teachers exacerbate the distrust between them. The distrust is further complicated by the fact that it is rarely articulated, but usually remains smoldering and silent.
When I first started in this field there were all kinds of stereotypes about autism, as if these were children from another planet, or children who had been brought up by wolves, that they weren't part of our population and were somehow separate.
I was so afraid to go out west to my aunt's ranch. But the only choice my mother gave me was to go for two weeks or all summer. I wound up staying all summer. And that's where I learned about cattle. I could relate to their behavior, their fears.
It was an important part of Mendelssohn's philosophical and religious view that the traditional rationalist proofs for God's existence should be sound an convincing. Kant thought they were not. So Kant's critique was world-shaking for Mendelssohn.
Positive psychology is both a movement and a science. The movement involves absolutely anyone who is interested in evidence-based approaches to improving well-being, either for themselves or for their community. I invite you to join this movement!
With a growth mindset, kids don't necessarily think that there's no such thing as talent or that everyone is the same, but they believe everyone can develop their abilities through hard work, strategies, and lots of help and mentoring from others.
Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.
We must not let ourselves be swept off our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power. Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous. It's just dangerous, much as coal mines, petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning and wind turbines are dangerous.
So I've gone in and out of the U.N., working on counter-terrorism, on U.N. reform, on peacekeeping, peace and security issues, many things through the years but always with a strong interest in humanitarian issues, and human rights issues as well.
The right for the right's sake is the motto which everyone should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet.
What is the nature of true morality? I have argued ... that it must be a kind of ethics involving letting go of one's own interest on behalf of others, being ready if necessary to sacrifice one's own interests for them, even on behalf of an enemy.
I started the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization.
While the feds ... leave Social Security off their books, the government's obligation to make benefit payments to current and near-term Social Security recipients is certainly no less real than its obligation to pay interest on its Treasury bonds.
War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.
Jesus and spirituality can easily become therapies that merely help us cope with life. They can serve us if we chose Him over other service providers. We even talk about "making Jesus my personal Lord and Savior," as if we could make Him anything!
The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.
I think we should really discourage this sort of empathic engagement when it comes to making moral decisions. I think we should focus on something like compassion, on getting people to care more for others without putting ourselves in their shoes.