Academic

🇺🇸James Watson

Science

1928–2025

"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

🇳🇬Chinua Achebe

Literature

1930–2013

"The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place."

🇺🇸Barack Obama

Politics

b. 1961

"Mandela demonstrated that action and ideas are not enough. No matter how right, they must be chiseled into law and institutions."

Eric Chu

Politics

b. 1961

"There is no right or wrong method . As long as we choose the most appropriate method at the time, that is the right method."

🇺🇸William H. Starbuck

Science

b. 1934

"A knowledge-intensive firm may not be information intensive... Knowledge is a stock of expertise, not a flow of information."

🇮🇷Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel

Politics

b. 1945

"Iranian Official: "No Place in Israel Will Be Safe"

🇺🇸John Bellamy Foster

Politics

b. 1953

"We are on a runaway train headed over the climate cliff as we stoke the engine with more coal to increase its speed."

🇨🇦Taraneh Javanbakht

Philosophy

b. 1974

"The human rights activity is not the ordinary but the canonical duty of thinkers and artists and they should take it into their consideration."

🇺🇸Thomas Gold

Science

1920–2004

"A theorist can explain any correlation, and its inverse."

🇺🇸Stanislav Grof

Psychology

b. 1931

"Stan Grof MP3 audio - from Shift in Action, sponsored by Institute of Noetic Sciences"

🇺🇸Nathaniel Branden

Philosophy

1930–2014

"It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior."

"The various positivities produced ... by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity."

🇮🇷Mohammad Javad Zarif

Politics

b. 1960

"The concept of a velvet revolution in Iran should not be considered as groundless fear."

"The perception that cannabis is a safe drug is a mistaken reaction to a past history of exaggeration of its health risks."

🇺🇸María Irene Fornés

Literature

avant-garde

1930–2018

"Theater is a service where the god keeps changing…Sometimes it’s the actor. Sometimes it’s the director. Sometimes it’s the stage manager. Sometimes, but almost never, it’s the playwright."

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."

🇮🇳Kailash Satyarthi

Social Activism

b. 1954

"I think of it all as a test. This is a moral examination that one has to pass... to stand up against such social evils."

🇺🇸Jeffrey Eugenides

Literature

b. 1960

"In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life."

🇺🇸Norman Finkelstein

Science

anti-Zionism

b. 1953

"Speaking as a devout atheist, thank God in his Almighty wisdom that he made us mortal."

"International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology"

🇺🇸Condoleezza Rice

Politics

b. 1954

"Protests are a part of our democratic heritage and our democratic privilege ... are finally getting those countries to the place that actually people might have the same privilege of protest". The Guardian, 2003-11-15"

🇺🇸Ian Stevenson

Psychology

1918–2007

"If the vapid writings . . . did indeed emanate from him, I can only say that this implies a terrible post-mortem reduction of personal capacities."

🇦🇺Michael Nielsen

Science

b. 1974

"We have to overthrow the idea that it's a diversion from "real" work when scientists conduct high-quality research in the open. Publicly funded science should be open science."

"They Never Wanted To Be Themselves , New York Times, May 24, 1987"

🇺🇸Terrance Hayes

Literature

b. 1971

"…I think that poets can do anything. With a novel, we all know about plot and character and yes, there’s experimental and people can recognize that, but I think that there are rules. I don’t think of poetry that way…"

🇮🇳Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Science

b. 1951

"Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence."

🇺🇸W. Richard Scott

Science

b. 1932

"Contingency theory is guided by the general orienting hypothesis that organizations whose internal features best match the demands of their environments will achieve the best adaptation."

Irene Tarimo

Science

b. 1964

"I knew that it was only education that was to liberate me and my family from the grips of poverty."

🇺🇸Kristen Clarke

Law

b. 1975

"If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed, we will turn the page on hate and close the door on discrimination by enforcing our federal civil rights laws."

🇨🇦Eric Berne

Psychology

1910–1970

"The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing."

🇺🇸Jhumpa Lahiri

Literature

b. 1967

"My grandfather always says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch."

🇺🇸Donald Knuth

Science

b. 1938

"The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues."

🇨🇳Jiang Shigong

Philosophy

b. 1967

"Time and history constitute the real God."

🇩🇪E. Lee Spence

Art

b. 1947

"As a child, everyone dreams of finding treasure. There’s romance and drama. But as an adult most people aren’t going to spend their lives trying to find it."

🇺🇸Paul D. Miller (academic)

Politics

"Socialism is a bad idea because it is naïve about power, which is the worst thing to be naïve about in politics."

"Powerfully positioned middlemen extract value by interrupting or distorting information."

🇹🇷Orhan Pamuk

Literature

naturalism

b. 1952

"When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free."

🇺🇸Gail Levin

Art

b. 1948

"By definition, a catalogue raissonne employs methodical scholarship to gather and digest in systematic form all that can be known of an artist's work and life. In short the evidence of his intellectual and cultural life."