Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

The Age of Anxiety

“(1947) A long poem by W.H. Auden. It concerns men and women who meet by chance in a New York bar in wartime; all are suffering from the modern malaise and feel guilty, isolated, and rootless. In a common dream, they set out on a quest through a barren wasteland. Hope in Christianity is presented as the solution to their problems. The title has frequently been used as a name to describe the mid-20th century.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Lord Acton, Famously, on Power

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, First Baron Acton (1834-1902)

Letter to Mandell Creighton, 3 April 1887

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Brewer’s Curious Titles: Guernica

“A painting (1937), perhaps the most famous of the 20th century, painted by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) in 1937 in horrified protest at a notorious atrocity in the Spanish Civil War. On 27 April 1937, bombers of the German Kondor Legion, in support of Franco’s nationalists, destroyed the ancient Basque capital of Guernica, causing many civilian casualties. Picasso’s stark monochromatic painting has become a symbol of the barbarity of modern warfare. There is a (probably apocryphal) story that while Picasso was living in Paris in the Second World War, a Gestapo officer visited his studio. Looking at the canvas of Guernica, the Nazi asked, ‘Did you do that?’ ‘No,’ Picasso replied, ‘you did.'”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

Left Brain/ Right Brain, Yin and Yang

“Left Brain/Right Brain is the innate conflict within our own minds. It is also the creative balance between that part of our mind which rationalizes, orders, creates processes and is logical, analytical and objective (the left brain) and that which is intuitive, thoughtful and subjective (the right brain). The creativity of an artist, a writer, or an entrepreneur is a right brain concept, which requires a daring, free-spirited, imaginative, uninhibited, unpredictable and revolutionary mindset. The critical thinking required by an academic or an administrator needs the strengths of the left brain: reductive, logical, focused, conservative, practical, and feasible. For anything to work well, there needs to be not only a balance but a fusion,

The most successful universal image of this is the T’ai Chi diagram: an egg composed of equal quantities of opposites: yolk and white, Yin and Yang. Yin is female, dark, earth-associated, passive, receptive, and lunar. Yant is associated with male energies: light, Heaven, sun and the active principle in nature. Together, they hatch mankind.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

The Algonquin Wits: Franklin Pierce Adams on Confidentiality

“Ninety-two percent of the stuff told you in confidence you couldn’t get anyone else to listen to.”

Franklin Pierce Adams

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

The Devil’s Dictionary: Corporation

“Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

Term of Art: Achievement

“achievement: The successful accomplishment of, or performance in, a socially defined task or goal. Talcott Parsons (in Social [sic] Theory and Modern Society, 1967) suggests that modern societies use indices of achievement–examination credentials or performance in role-based tasks–rather than ascriptive criteria to recruit, select, and evaluate individuals for particular roles, However, research demonstrates the continued influence of ascription in social stratification, notably according to such factors as race and sex. There is an interesting cross-disciplinary discussion of the concept and its interpretation of achievement, its relationship to creativity and innovation, and its role in explaining economic growth in England and Japan since the seventeenth century, in Penelope Gouk (ed.), Wellsprings of Achievement (1995).”

Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Term of Art: Achievement Motivation

“achievement motivation: Defined as the need to perform well or the striving for success, and evidenced by persistence and effort in the face of difficulties, achievement motivation is regarded as a central human motivation. Psychologist David McClelland (The Achieving Society, 1961) measured it by analyzing respondent’s narratives; rather more controversially he hypothesized that was related to economic growth. Lack of achievement motivation was, for a period during the 1950s and 1960s, a fashionable explanation for lack of economic development in the Third World–notably among certain American modernization theorists. This thesis was much criticized by dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank (Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, 1969).”

Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Lacquer

“A resinous varnish that, when applied in several layers, attains a high polish. True lacquer comes from the Japanese lac tree. Characteristically oriental, lacquer work spread to Europe in the early 18th century. Usually decorated.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

What’s Worth Fighting for Out There?

“Among the many purposes of schooling, four stand out to us as having special moral value: to love and care, to serve, to empower and, of course, to learn.”

Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan What’s Worth Fighting For Out There? (1998)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.