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Mortimer J. Adler
Philosopher and Educator
"Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men." View |
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Madeleine Korbel Albright
Diplomat
"While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile." View |
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Bhimrao Ambedkar
Founding Father, Modern India
"An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering." View |
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Edwin Howard Armstrong
Inventor
"The continuous good fortune which has followed me, providing second chances at inventions when the first chance was missed and tossed away, has been all that a man could hope for and more than he has any right to expect." View |
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Isaac Asimov
Author and Scientist
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster." View |
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Emanuel Ax
Pianist
"I really hope we can go back to the feeling that applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty." View |
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Frederick A. P. Barnard
Educator
"It is earnestly to be hoped that no single and earnest seeker after knowledge, of whatever age, sex, or previous condition, shall be denied the privilege of coming here." View |
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Salo Wittmayer Baron
Historian
"Only in a university can be found the range and diversity of disciplines and intellectual strengths that are necessary components of contemporary Judaicahistory, political science, economics, sociology, philology, languages, and literatures." View |
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Jacqueline Barton
Chemist
"What many people don't realize is how dynamic the structure of DNA is. The base pairs are always moving and vibrating, electrons are migrating, holes are opening up and closing through the center of the DNA." View |
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Jacques Barzun
Historian
"The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind." View |
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Ruth Fulton Benedict
Anthropologist
"I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world." View |
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Adolph Augustus Berle, Jr.
Economic Theorist
"The 'free market' … has been completely displaced as the infallible god, has been substantially displaced as universal economic master, and increasingly ceases to be, or to be thought of as, the only acceptable way of economic life." View |
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Theos Casimir Bernard
Explorer and Scholar of Religion
"It should be thought very strange if one's hands and feet refused to behave, or behaved in a manner which showed that their owner had no control over them. Yet that is how too often human beings allow their most delicate instrument, the mind, to behave." View |
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Hazel Bishop
Chemist
"Women should use make-up to accentuate their most attractive feature. After the age of 25 or thereabouts, personality becomes an increasingly more attractive feature." View |
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Franz Boas
Anthropologist
"If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present." View |
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Warren Edward Buffett
Investor
"It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." View |
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John W. Burgess
Educator
"We value [history] not by its brilliance, but by its productiveness." View |
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Arthur Burns
Economist
"Professional economists should stick to their knitting...economic counseling and political advocacy could get in one another's way." View |
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Nicholas Murray Butler
Educator
"Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress." View |
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Mary Calderone
Sex Educator
"We're still a sexophobic society, afraid of the wrong things for the wrong reason." View |
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Benjamin Cardozo
Jurist
"The judicial process is one of compromise between paradoxes, between certainty and uncertainty, between the literalism that is exaltation of the written word and the nihilism that is destructive of regularity and order." View |
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Bennett Alfred Cerf
Publisher
"There have been too many [books] in which some young man is looking forward, backward or sideways in anger. Or in which some Southern youth is being chased through the magnolia bushes by his aunt. She catches him on page 28 with horrid results." View |
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Charles Frederick Chandler
Educator
"He has placed the entire world in his debt, and brought added dignity and prestige to the profession of which he is such a conspicuous ornament." —Perkin Medal citation, 1920 View |
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DeWitt Clinton
New York Builder
"The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven." View |
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Barry Commoner
Environmentalist
"The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else." View |
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John Corigliano
Composer
"I find the best art coming out of HBO…No matter what it's doing, whether it's comic or horror, it knows it must reach an audience." View |
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André Frédéric Cournand
Physiologist
"We must educate people to develop a taste for ideas." View |
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Lawrence Arthur Cremin
Historian
"When the Russians beat us into space, the public blamed the schools,
not realizing that the only thing that had been proved was that their
German scientists had gotten ahead of our German scientists." View |
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John Dewey
Philosopher
"The future of our civilization depends upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific cast of mind." View |
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William Joseph Donovan
General
"The Office of Strategic Services means what its name implies: every
service of a strategic nature, tried or untried, that may be useful to
our Army and Navy and Air Force." View |
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William Orville Douglas
Jurist
"The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government." View |
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Irwin Edman
Philosopher, Poet
"Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine." View |
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
U.S. President
"Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage." View |
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Niles Eldredge
Paleontologist
"If you are passionately interested in something, it's not hard." View |
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John Erskine
Literary Scholar
"Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information." View |
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William Maurice Ewing
Earth Scientist
"It's my view that we won't know where the most interesting places are until we've seen all of them." View |
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Clifton Fadiman
Author, Editor
"For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed." View |
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Enrico Fermi
Physicist
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge." View |
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Hamilton Fish
Statesman
"If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace." View |
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Virginia Kneeland Frantz
Surgical Pathologist
"If you go into medicine with stardust in your eyes you will be quickly disillusioned. But, if you are crazy enough to be determined to do it...the rewards are enormous." View |
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Milton Friedman
Economist
"History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition." View |
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Fred W. Friendly
Journalist
"Our job is not to make up anybody's mind but to make the agony of decision-making so intense you can only escape by thinking." View |
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Arthur Ira Garfunkel
Singer
"It's taken me years to realize that the first or the second take is often the one. That's when you're authentically yourself—in spite of yourself." View |
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Lou Gehrig
Athlete
"There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all." View |
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Allen Ginsberg
Poet
"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does." View |
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Jurist
"Civil liberties are an essential part of the overall human rights concernthe equality of all people and the ability to be free." View |
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Stephen Jay Gould
Paleontologist
"If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields." View |
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Moses Hadas
Classicist
"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." View |
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Alexander Hamilton
Founding Father
"The existence of slavery makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason or experience." View |
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Oscar Hammerstein II
Lyricist and Librettist
"He's a meticulously hard worker and yet he'll roam the grass of his farm for hours and sometimes for days before he can bring himself to put a word on paper." —Rodgers on Hammerstein View |
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Lorenz Hart
Lyricist
"The theater-going public is so many intellectual cuts above the popular music-buying public that it’s criminal to hand them a series of metrical insults and call it a score. Songs should advance the plot." View |
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Joseph Heller
Author
"People go to fight wars because they don't understand the seriousness of what they're doing." View |
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Gilbert Arthur Highet
Classicist
"A teacher must believe in the value and interest of his subject as a doctor believes in health." View |
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Richard Hofstadter
Historian
"A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind." View |
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Herman Hollerith
Inventor
"The object of my invention is to generally facilitate the compilation and increase the scope of . . . statistics." View |
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Langston Hughes
Writer
"Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly."
View |
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Pixley ka Isaka Seme
Political Activist
"The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilization is soon to be added to the world." View |
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John Jay
Founding Father
"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." View |
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Donald Clarence Judd
Artist and critic
"A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole." View |
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Eric Kandel
Neurophysiologist
"One of the most remarkable aspects of an animal's behavior is the ability to modify that behavior by learning, an ability that reaches its highest form in human beings." View |
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Alfred Kazin
Critic and Writer
"I was a literary radical, indifferent to economics, suspicious of organization, planning, Marxist solemnity and intellectual system building ." View |
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Thomas Howard Kean
Governor
"Teaching is the only job I have ever had that can compare to being governor of a great state." View |
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Helen Kim
Educator
"Freedom is not just a word here, not just a concept taken for granted. Its meaning is in the air we breathe, in our thoughts, in our hearts." View |
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John Werner Kluge
Business Leader
"I think it's very important to have imagination and very important to dream, but I also think it is important to keep ideas to yourself until you are implementing them." View |
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Alfred Abraham Knopf
Publisher
"I think that best-seller lists ought to be abolished by law. They're just another example of running with the crowd." View |
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V. K. Wellington Koo
Diplomat
"The recent history of both Europe and Asia shows beyond a doubt the futility of trying to turn a tiger into a kitten by giving it a dish of cream." View |
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Tony Kushner
Playwright
"My day job is playwright. My citizen job is activist. That's every citizen's job. I succeed and fail at both my jobs, but I try to do them both." View |
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Seth Low
New York City Leader
"The great city can teach something that no university by itself can altogether impart: a vivid sense of the largeness of human brotherhood, a vivid sense of man's increasing obligation to man; a vivid sense of our absolute dependence on one another." View |
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Sid Luckman
Athlete
"You had to be there to realize how great Sid was." —Jimmy Cannon, sportswriter. View |
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Otto Luening
Composer
"In American music today there's a terrific amount of differentiation, a variety of styles and approaches. And that's the American story: this enormous, broad thing." View |
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Alfred Thayer Mahan
Naval Historian
"War now not only occurs more rarely . . . [but is] an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy." View |
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Irwin D. Mandel
Oral Biologist
"Even in the oral cavity microcosm, we tolerate our neighbors but eschew uninvited strangers." View |
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Herman Mankiewicz
Screenwriter
"In a movie… [t]he villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating, stealing, getting rich, and whipping servants. But you have to shoot him in the end." View |
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Joseph Mankiewicz
Filmmaker
"I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse, and end of the talking picture." View |
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Brander Matthews
Drama Scholar
"The art of teaching requires the instructor to guide his student to work independently to discover principles for himself, and in time to acquire the power of principles to the manifold situations which may confront him." View |
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Anna Caroline Maxwell
Nurse
"Can a higher service be rendered mankind than is in our power to give?" View |
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Terrence McNally
Playwright
"When the lights go down and the curtain goes up, how can you not get a rush? I mean, you'd not be human." View |
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Margaret Mead
Anthropologist
"It's all one world. There are no islands anymore." View |
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James Howard Meredith
Activist
"Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind." View |
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Robert King Merton
Sociologist
"My life of learning has been largely shaped by a long series of chance encounters and consequential choices." View |
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Thomas Merton
Essayist
"God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself." View |
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Charles Wright Mills
Sociologist
"There are more men of knowledge in the service of power than men of power in the service of knowledge." View |
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John Purroy Mitchel
New York City Mayor
"No stauncher American, no abler and more disinterested public servant, and no finer natural soldier than [John] Purroy Mitchel was to be found in all our country." —Theodore Roosevelt View |
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Clement Clarke Moore
Biblical Scholar
"But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night." View |
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Thomas Hunt Morgan
Zoologist
"There is no doubt that man, as an animal, inherits characteristics, good and evil, as do animals and plants." View |
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Gouverneur Morris
Founding Father
"This country must be united. If persuasion does not unite it, the sword will." View |
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Robert Moses
Shaper of New York City
"If the ends don't justify the means, what does?" View |
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Story Musgrave
Astronaut
"Statistically it's a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligences, life forms out there." View |
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Koji Nakanishi
Chemist
"I can explain the principle behind a good science experiment in 15 seconds; the same with magic." View |
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Allan Nevins
Historian
"Instead of dissecting impersonal forces . . . the historian should narrate the past in terms of living men and women seen as individuals, groups, or communities; and he should give due emphasis to personal motivation and initiative." View |
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Marjorie Hope Nicolson
Literary Scholar
"Social scientists must believe that poetry, essays, and drama are as legitimate expressions of the spirit of man as the works of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smithor even Karl Marx." View |
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Georgia O'Keeffe
Artist
"I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty." View |
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William Barclay Parsons
Civil Engineer
"The underlying principles of the present state of world culture, or civilization as it is usually and erroneously called, rest on engineering." View |
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George Elmer Pataki
Governor
"When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves." View |
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Walker Percy
Writer
"If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search." View |
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Frances Perkins
U.S. Secretary of Labor
"I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen." View |
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Joseph Pulitzer
Writer
"A newspaper should [do] more than…printing every day first-rate news and first-rate editorials. It should have hobbies, undertake reforms, lead crusades, and thereby establish a name for individuality and active public service." View |
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Michael Idvorsky Pupin
Electrical Engineer
"The greatest scientists in the world have never discovered how to make grass into milk." View |
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Anna Quindlen
Writer
"If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all." View |
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Helen M. Ranney
Physician
"We were the group that was there in medicine when medicine became a science." View |
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James Renwick
Architect
"A magnificent Gothic Revival church, designed by an engineer who studied the copybooks of [English] theorists and detailers… One of the city's greatest treasures." AIA Guide to New York View |
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Dickinson Woodruff Richards, Jr.
Physiologist
"Our findings have been for the most part preliminary, revealing new problems more often than solving old ones." View |
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Paul Robeson
Singer, Actor, Activist
"The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery." View |
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Richard Rodgers
Composer
"I hand him a lyric and get out of his way."
—Hammerstein on Rodgers View |
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt
U.S. President
"Liberty is the air that we Americans breathe. Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free. That civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against the abuse of freedom." View |
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Theodore Roosevelt
U.S. President
"Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." View |
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Meyer Schapiro
Art Historian
"Art has its own conditions which distinguish it from other activities. It operates with its own special materials and according to general psychological laws." View |
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Hu Shih
Philosopher, Educator
"Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility." View |
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Harlan Fiske Stone
Jurist
"There were precious few who understood and followed the commands and restraints of the Constitution, who supported the essence of limited government, who enhanced the concept of popular government under law, who furthered respect for the Bill of Rights as fully as Stone did."
— Henry J. Abraham View |
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Arthur Sulzberger
Publisher
"We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat." View |
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Lawrence A. Tabak
Dental Researcher
"We need to challenge ourselves to find even more innovative and effective ways of doing biomedical research and converting that into cures." View |
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Marie Tharp
Oceanographer
"It was very exciting in those days. We were explorers." View |
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Twyla Tharp
Choreographer
"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home." View |
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Lionel Trilling
Critic
"Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over." View |
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Rexford Guy Tugwell
Economist
"Fundamental changes of attitude, new disciplines, revised legal structures, unaccustomed limitations on activity, are all necessary if we are to plan. This amounts, in fact, to the abandonment, finally, of laissez-faire." View |
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Harold Clayton Urey
Chemist
"I do not think we should intentionally lose the armaments race; to do this will be to lose our liberties and, with Patrick Henry, I value my liberties more than my life." View |
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Mark Van Doren
Teacher
"Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth." View |
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Eudora Welty
Writer
"I want so desperately for people to see something of themselves when they look at me." View |
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Milton Moran Weston II
Activist
"A banker-priest is really no more strange than an educator-priest or a social worker priest." View |
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Stephen Wise
Rabbi
"How can a rabbi be vital and independent and helpful if he be tethered and muzzled?" View |
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Herman Wouk
Author
"If [the artist] understands his responsibility and acts on it—taking the art seriously always, himself never quite—he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist." View |
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Chien-Shiung Wu
Physicist
"The sudden liberation of our thinking on the very structure of the physical world was overwhelming." View |
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Check out the C250 timeline, chronicling Columbia's rise from a tiny college to one of the world's preeminent universities.
The first single-volume interpretive history of the University in 100 years.
Download the official C250 To Go screensaver and desktop wallpaper or send C250 e-mail postcards. |
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