Russell Jacoby famous quotes

Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.
-- Russell Jacoby

#Past #Thinking #Space

Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.
-- Russell Jacoby

#Common Sense #Half #World

The radicals...want speech regulated by codes that proscribe certain language. They see free speech as at best a delusion, at worst a threat to the welfare of minorities and women....The most obvious (and cynical) explanation for the switched positions is the switched situations. Protesting students became established professors and administrators. For outsiders, free speech is bread and butter; for insiders, indigestion. To the new academics, unregulated free speech spells trouble.
-- Russell Jacoby

#Cynical #Want #Outsiders

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

If you don't have a vision for the future, then your future is threatened to be a repeat of the past.

Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn't saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.

I'll get up there and I'll do my guitar solos in one of those space outfits.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.