Guest Lecture Quotes

The last guest lecturer to honor the students with her presence had been Isabelle Lightwood. And the 'lecture' had consisted of a stern and humiliating warning that every female in a ten-mile radius should keep her grubby littler hands off Simon's hot bod. Fortunately, the tall, dark-haired man who strode to the front of the classroom looked unlikely to have any interest in Simon or his bod.

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I’d taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and help him get current. Maybe he’d invite me back as a guest lecturer. He’d probably expect some strategies along with the situations though, so I guess that wouldn’t work, but whatever.

What height is this table?' he said suddenly, just as I was about to go to the bread bin for a slice to wipe my plate with. I turned round and looked at him, wondering why he was bothering with such an easy question. 'Thirty inches,' I told him, and took a crust from the bin. 'Wrong,' he said with an eager grin. 'Two foot six.' I shook my head at him, scowling, and wiped the brown rim of soup from the inside of my plate. There was a time when I was genuinely afraid of these idiotic questions, but now, apart from the fact that I must know the height, length, breadth, area and volume of just about every part of the house and everything in it, I can see my father's obsession for what it is. It gets embarrassing at times when there are guests in the house, even if they are family and ought to know what to expect. They'll be sitting there, probably in the lounge, wondering whether Father's going to feed them anything or just give an impromptu lecture on cancer of the colon or tapeworms, when he'll sidle up to somebody, look round to make sure everybody's watching, then in a conspiratorial stage-whisper say: 'See that door over there? It's eighty-five inches, corner to corner. ' Then he'll wink and walk off, or slide over on his seat, looking nonchalant.

This self was not really you, it didn't sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say.

One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose---one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lecturers thrown in.

Even an imagined togetherness beats being alone.

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

I felt also, for the first time that evening, the pinch of my own deep loneliness, never far from me in those days, always just out past the edge of my so-called self-awareness.

Ignorance doesn't make you good at anything. You don't free yourself by unlearning. You have to learn past all you've learned.

Words shaped the world economy and the human body, both.

Reading and writing being the only good methods I have ever found for emptying my insomnia mind, and calming it.

But for some reason reading works, reading in particular. The mental release, the distraction, or maybe just the voice, the company.

I’d been caught up in myself, my grand entrance to humanity. But humanity was just a bunch of people I didn’t know standing on the far side of a pool, and none of them seemed very impressed.

At a small dinner with other business executives, the guest of honor spoke the entire time without taking a breath. This meant that the only way to ask a question or make an observation was to interrupt. Three or four men jumped in, and the guest politely answered their questions before resuming his lecture. At one point, I tried to add something to the conversation and he barked, "Let me finish! You people are not good at listening!" Eventually, a few more men interjected and he allowed it. Then the only other female executive at the dinner decided to speak up--and he did it again! He chastised her for interrupting. After the meal, one of the male CEOs pulled me aside to say that he had noticed that only the women had been silenced. He told me he empathized, because as a Hispanic, he has been treated like this many times.

You enjoy speaking your ideas but you also hate it, and finally you hate it more than you enjoy it. Hearing yourself form words and project them toward people, who will probably not care much anyway. Who might at best watch curiously as your words sail past them and bounce off the back wall.

Plato, who was a total elitist, by the way, and hated democracy, because he thought average people were too dumb to make their own decisions and ought to be governed by philosophers, because philosophers alone understand “essential truths.” Apparently he never met anyone from our philosophy department

There was the pessimism of the revolutionaries, as Keynes called it, the worry of those who thought the world so doomed that the only hope was to turn everything upside down. Then there was the pessimism of the reactionaries, those who thought the world so doomed that any sort of change at all would send civilization reeling into the abyss.

Now the box is open, reality spills out, and there's no way to stuff it back in. Judgment has been meted out, the first sentence handed down, first of many because once this trial gets going there is no going back. The proceedings are irreversible, the stakes existential, the accusations keep piling up, the prosecution is relentless, the prosecution never rests, the defense never rests, nobody in this whole damn place ever rests.

Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you'd managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you'd always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused.

As we prepared for sleep that night I noticed that Lisa was staring at her reflection in the mirror. She looked as young now as the day I met her, no grey upon her jet black hair, face always pale, she rarely sun bathed, dark glittering eyes and finally pearly white teeth. What a woman, always passionate about her affairs and always interested in my work. Shame her family could not attend our wedding. I suppose that is the hazard of marrying a Slav, either the family is dead, scattered or too poor to fly to England. Still it was a happy wedding, a quiet one with a few friends from work. Lisa crawled into bed beside me; her body, always cold, quickly warmed to my touch. Why are women always cold when they first get into bed? We kissed for what seemed an age, caressing each other’s bodies until at last she pushed me onto my back, straddled me and smiled looking down into my eyes. She licked her lips and slowly leant forward. The next morning I checked my neck for any tell-tale signs of our love making. Again Lisa had bitten every inch of my body and left not a mark. I smiled down at her sleeping form, kissed her cheek and went to my study. I had term papers to mark and research for my next set of lectures. Lisa came into my study just after lunch. For a woman just out of bed she looked remarkably well, her hair was untangled, her cheeks full in bloom, there were no signs of tiredness in her eyes at all. I smiled at her as we kissed, then she told me of the theme for the dinner party. Eleven guests as usual and each one would have to be very special. I left her to set up the invitations and planning. This was going to be the Last supper revisited it seemed.

In short, it was entirely natural that the newts stopped being a sensation, even though there were now as many as a hundred million of them; the public interest they had excited had been the interest of a novelty. They still appeared now and then in films (Sally and Andy, the Two Good Salamanders) and on the cabaret stage where singers endowed with an especially bad voice came on in the role of newts with rasping voices and atrocious grammar, but as soon as the newts had become a familiar and large-scale phenomenon the problems they presented, so to speak, were of a different character. (13) Although the great newt sensation quickly evaporated it was replaced with something that was somewhat more solid - the Newt Question. Not for the first time in the history of mankind, the most vigorous activist in the Newt Question was of course a woman. This was Mme. Louise Zimmermann, the manager of a guest house for girls in Lausanne, who, with exceptional and boundless energy, propagated this noble maxim around the world: Give the newts a proper education! She would tirelessly draw attention both to the newts' natural abilities and to the danger that might arise for human civilisation if the salamanders weren't carefully taught to reason and to understand morals, but it was long before she met with anything but incomprehension from the public. (14) "Just as the Roman culture disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians our own educated civilisation will disappear if it is allowed to become no more than an island in a sea of beings that are spiritually enslaved, our noble ideals cannot be allowed to become dependent on them," she prophesied at six thousand three hundred and fifty seven lectures that she delivered at women's institutes all over Europe, America, Japan, China, Turkey and elsewhere. "If our culture is to survive there must be education for all. We cannot have any peace to enjoy the gifts of our civilisation nor the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched and inferior beings artificially held down in the state of animals. Just as the slogan of the nineteenth century was 'Freedom for Women', so the slogan of our own age must be 'GIVE THE NEWTS A PROPER EDUCATION!'" And on she went. Thanks to her eloquence and her incredible persistence, Mme. Louise Zimmermann mobilised women all round the world and gathered sufficient funds to enable her to found the First Newt Lyceum at Beaulieu (near Nice), where the tadpoles of salamanders working in Marseilles and Toulon were instructed in French language and literature, rhetoric, public behaviour, mathematics and cultural history. (15) The Girls' School for Newts in Menton was slightly less successful, as the staple courses in music, diet and cookery and fine handwork (which Mme. Zimmermann insisted on for primarily pedagogical reasons) met with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm, if not with a stubborn hostility among its young students. In contrast with this, though, the first public examinations for young newts was such an instant and startling success that they were quickly followed by the establishment of the Marine Polytechnic for Newts at Cannes and the Newts' University at Marseilles with the support of the society for the care and protection of animals; it was at this university that the first newt was awarded a doctorate of law.

Once Mom and Ossie and I spent an afternoon alone together in her hospital room. We were watching the small TV above her head politely, as if the TV were a foreign dignitary giving an unintelligible lecture, and waiting for any news from Dr. Gautman. As if on cue, that lame movie from the sixties started playing, Ladies In Waiting. A quintet of actresses haunt the punch bowl--they are supposed to be spinster sisters or spinster best friends, or maybe just ugly and needy acquaintances--anyhow, these pink chameleons, voiceless in their party chignons, they stand around the back of a ballroom having flashbacks for most of the movie, regretting older events in their minds, ladling cups of glowing punch from a big bowl, and only after the dying violin note of the final song do they at last step away from the wall. "Oh, but we DID want to dance!" the actresses cry at the end of the scene, their faces changing almost totally. All these angry multiplying women. Hopes were like these ladies, Mom told us. Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart. Our mom had become agitated as the movie credits rolled: There had never been a chance for them! What STUPID women. That day we watched TV with her until the hospital began to empty, until the lights went white as a screech and the room grew so quiet...

Whether writing for a text book, for e-learning, or for lecture notes for an instructor-led class, you can improve learning by thinking of yourself as a “learning host.” A good host makes guests feel comfortable and engages them in the event.

My guest today is John Arno, an esteemed lecturer, investigator, and privacy expert. He’s the founder of JPS, Inc., a company offering privacy and security services. JPS is also John’s personal nickname, a play on GPS, because of his remarkable track record locating people. Over the course of his career, which spans four decades, he’s helped find thousands of bail jumpers, deadbeat parents, runaways, insurance scammers, kidnapping victims, even celebrities. Arno himself offers an additional service to a select clientele: using his unique expertise, he helps people disappear.

Thinking you’re too good for crappy demeaning capitalism is a kind of snobbery.

the way everyone always reads the programs at the symphony, because there’s nothing else to do while you’re sitting there.

So many amazing people and the different ways they’ve contributed to humanity and all along all I’ve wanted was to be one of them. Not prizes or recognition, just to feel, myself, that I had joined that conversation.

I’ve used an activity in my classrooms before, where I tell my class that we’re going to spend three minutes in complete silence. Nobody can close their eyes and sleep through the three minutes, nor can they busy themselves by reading or scrolling. Instead, we simply sit in silence together for a full three minutes. You should see their eyes when I announce this. I may as well announce that our guest speaker for the day is a greasy, stank-ass hillbilly with a chainsaw and a mask made from the skin of his prior victims. In fact, such a guest “lecture” may be preferable for many. During this time, people behave predictably. The first 30 seconds are the easiest. From 30-45 seconds, everyone contracts a case of the giggles, and students try to stifle themselves. After the one-minute mark, eyes wander, desperately seeking something to occupy their attention. Some count ceiling tiles, others stare out the window at cloud formations, and many discover solace in examining feet. From 90 seconds to the two-minute mark, students visibly squirm in their seats like a crack addict jonesing for a fix, but once we get into the second minute, something remarkable happens. People chill the fuck out. They no longer avoid eye contact with me or one another. They smile quaint little grins. The squirming subsides, they sit up a bit straighter, and the tension hanging heavy in the air like leaded fog dissipates. When the timer on my phone goes off at three minutes, one might assume that someone in the room would shout and break the uncomfortable silence like they’d been holding their breath the whole time, but they don’t. I never rush our entrance back into dialogue; rather, I wait and allow students to speak first. What’s crazy is that, generally speaking, most students go nearly another minute or so before saying anything.

All of this will end. Life will move on to whatever comes next.

Humanity's true dilemma, its permanent problem, is—what to do with all our free time.

Of course, when an economist tells you not to worry, you might worry all the more. An economist's "don't worry" usually means something bloodlessly calculated, like "worrying will increase the inclination to hoard currency and decrease spending on consumer goods.

How both nature and culture have taught us to derive our sense of purpose through work, and how for most people, leisure, too, will have to be learned, slowly and over time. "How to occupy leisure." Leisure as occupation. Finding meaning in a jobless life.

Money, in particular, will become less important to us. We'll understand that money was never important in itself, that it was only ever important in relation to our needs.

The rich man of his day still saw money as an end, not a means, and found meaning in a constantly deferred future rather than the here and now. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day.

John Cage once climbed into a sensory deprivation tank and came out later announcing that there's no such thing as true silence as long as you're alive, because you can always hear your own heartbeat. To experience absolute silence, you'd need to be dead.

Here I am serving myself up as some sort of expert on how to proceed through the world with intention and purpose when in fact I am utterly lost.

They need to know your shortcomings because that's what makes you human, and your humanity is a large part of why you're worth talking about at all. Okay?

We could all find our true callings and would come to judge the quality of our lives, not in dollars and possessions, but in how our time is spent.

How any time I would successfully fulfill some expectation, they would add others on top of it, like a boss who can't even keep track of all the meaningless crap he's asked you to do. How they kept upping the expectations and darkening the forecast, so that the more I did, and the further I advanced, the less likely it seemed that I would ever arrive.

The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all, said Joan Robinson.

You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them.

You are capable of being many selves but the moment you commit to one, it becomes an imposter, a dummy to dress up and roll out into the world in your place. And you hate the dummy, hate everything it says, even though it only says what you give it to say, and even though the words you give it to say are the best you can come up with. Which means, must mean, that the fault is not with the dummy but with you. That you are not as brilliant as you've always wanted to believe. As you've needed to believe. That it is easy to be impressed with yourself in private but another thing entirely to project a public self into the world—that this is a skill they don't teach in school, yet so so so many people seem to have learned it.

How did all these people, effortless at parties, easy on social media, how did they learn to be public? There must have been a moment, an afternoon in elementary school, when an imposing gray eminence showed up to class and passed out everyone's public personas while you were in the bathroom. And here you are decades later still forced to pretend you'd been in class that day.

The person who puts herself out there is always the accused. How did this never occur to you? No doubt it occurred to a part of you, the part that kept putting it off. No doubt that's why you postponed the trial as long as possible, preferring instead to live in a juvenile state of perpetual expectation, not because of the part that assumed you would someday be amazing, but because of the part that knew you would end up here, and what now?

If everyone else seems unfazed by this, the endlessness of everything, that isn't because they live any less in the midst or on the spot or under the gun but because they manage it better than you do, or at least they are better at hiding it. You're better at hiding than at hiding it, better at avoiding than bearing it, better at hoping it will all go away if you lie still eyes closed hands clenched hands clenched breathe—

You were born into an era of overload. Leaving things out is the great unmastered art form of your age.

She was sitting on a bench, her skirts bunched up on her thighs and her elbows resting on her knees as she tried to slow her breathing, when she heard a male voice. “Um, I think I should tell you I’m here.” Jane sat upright, quickly pulling her skirts back down to her ankles. She had been wearing drawers, of course, but it still felt absurdly immodest to sit that way in 1816 attire. She looked around, seeing no one. “Where are you?” she asked. Theodore, her dance partner of late, stood from behind the bush directly in front of her. His impressive height made it seem that he was slowly expanding while standing up, like stretched taffy. “What were you doing back there?” “I’m a gardener,” he said, raising the shovel and pick like a show of evidence. “I was just working here, I wasn’t trying to spy.” “You, uh, caught me there at an unladylike moment. Mrs. Wattlesbrook would probably box my ears.” “That’s why I spoke. I wanted to let you know you were not alone before you did something--something worse.” “Like what?” “Whatever women do when they think they’re alone.” He laughed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about, you surprised me and I’m just--” His smile dropped. “Sorry, I shouldn’t talk…I’m not supposed to talk to you.” “Well, you already have. We may as well meet for real this time, without old Wattlesbrook spying. I’m Jane.” “Theodore the gardener,” he said, wiping off his hand and then offering it to her. She shook it, wondered if they should be bowing and curtsying, but is that what you do with a gardener? The entire conversation felt forbidden, like a secret Austen chapter that she discovered longhand in some forgotten file. “The gardens look lovely.” “Thank you, ma’am.” Ma’am? she thought. “So,” he said, his eyes taking in everything but her face, “you’re from the former colonies?” She looked hard at him to detect if he was serious. He glanced at her, then down again, and sort of bowed. She laughed. He tossed his pick into the ground. “I can’t play this. I sound completely daft.” “Why would you have to play anything?” “I’m supposed to be invisible. You don’t know all the lectures we heard on the matter--stay out of the way, look down, don’t bother the guests. I shouldn’t have said a word, but I was afraid of getting stuck behind that shrub all day trying not to make a peep. Or worse, you discovering me after a time and thinking I was a lecherous lunatic trying to peek up your skirt. So, anyhow, how do you do, the name’s Martin Jasper, originally from Bristol, raised in Sheffield, enjoy seventies rock and walks in the rain, and please don’t tell Mrs. Wattlesbrook. I need this job.” “I didn’t exactly find Mrs. Wattlesbrook the kind of lady I’d be tempted to confide in. Don’t worry, Martin.” “Thanks. Guess I should leave you to your lady stuff.” He picked up his tools and walked away.

Chris Salamone’s law program focuses on guest lecturers that are taken by the members of the Department of Justice and attorneys

Consciously or unconsciously, every day you decide which constructs to accept and which to question, about yourself and about the world. You can’t question everything.

Kesgrave, however, did not talk to her during dinner. Indeed, he spoke few words to anyone, and watching him sullenly examine his fellow guests, Bea found herself wanting to hurl a dinner roll at him just to elicit a lecture on the throwing arch of flour-based projectiles.

Iz did not have bad thoughts. Or at least, he did not allow the bad thoughts to win, though it took an exhausting amount of effort. He painted his nails Lilacs-in-June and Apple Blossom White and told himself he was scary, and brilliant, and only a bit freakish. He reminded himself that someone like Ronnie loved him as he struggled through extra credit work he didn’t care about and drifted through two on-campus guest lectures. He used depilatory cream because some days shaving was too much, and he stared at the circles under his eyes and wondered if it mattered whether or not he was beautiful if two particular people did not care. Those were perilous moments. He forced himself to get up in time to do his hair properly before class. No messy buns. No ponytails. He ate oatmeal for breakfast, every day, even if he forgot lunch and dinner. He sat outside if it was sunny, and returned to the library when it was not, so no one could say he hid in his bedroom. He did not go out with his friends. He did not visit or talk to anyone for long, except Giselle, who set him down in front of a period drama miniseries that lasted for hours as if that was any kind of distraction when Iz could barely focus.

Pter Mirmotahari had once visited Victoria high school as a guest lecturer, back when I was in the 5th standard. I was mesmerized by how much he really cared for the well being of children. He is the reason why I am working as a social worker for 2 years now.

Which is perhaps a special case of the general theory of having a family at all. It makes you less crazy than you’d otherwise be, but it doesn’t allow you to get as crazy as you sometimes need to.

Experience itself was personal, a thing you could never share with anyone else, not really. You could try. You could overlap with another person, your experiences of the world could briefly coincide in time and space and in that sense feel shared. You could have friends. But only you could ever know what the world felt like to you. And you could never know what the world felt like to another person. In that sense, you were always alone.

Life is hard enough. You were born into a homogeneous wasteland, a society that champions sameness but treats people differently, a culture orchestrated to sell you things. You found a way out, a way of understanding yourself and growing, of breaking through intellectual boundaries, but you carried forth from your upbringing a deep-seated resistance to other sorts of messiness—emotional, interpersonal—and fear of confrontation in any form. You enjoy a theoretical generosity toward humanity, but in many ways you are kind of an asshole.

There is nothing we can do for each other, in the end we are all alone.

This is what's wrong with the world. Purely and simply wrong. That two people who are alone and who know each other can't manage to reach out to one another, to offer company, because of the hour and the roles we play. Landlady. Tenant. Stupid roles for a stupid world. Stupid rules! We force ourselves to follow them, but we're the ones who suffer.

It's not that you fail to pay attention in such moments, but that you pay so much attention there's no room for anything else.

Events that happened years ago, that are utterly lost to the past and have no consequences for the present, should not hit you in the middle of the night with an onrush of shame and self-loathing. Mistakes made when you were young that barely even mattered at the time should not revisit you years later and make your whole body cringe. There needs to be a statute of limitations.

Sir Thomas More tries to make up for this by suggesting that in the absence of private property, and thus of greed, most of our vile pastimes wouldn't interest us anyway.

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

A single college day contained more "life experience" than an entire month of high school.

Questioning her own enthusiasm, feeling pretentious and shitty and wanting to escape herself by taking what she assumed would be the most practical path—who made that enormous life-shaping decision. Having no idea, of course, where it would lead.

Nothing is bad, everything is good, just being used badly. Hello, story of my life! "She had a lot of energy, but she used it badly," the epitaph will read. "She had energy to spare in the middle of the night, in the useless hours of the morning. Her insomnia energy could have fueled a small nation sustainably. She cared about the right things—she did!—but she did not pursue them as fully or as openly as she might have.

But when she asked herself how she got there, it was like walking into a mist. All she came up with was a handful of stories from her past, people she'd known who had shaped her. Who were responsible, to some extent, for the person she'd become. Emphasizing nurture because nature is really just yourself, whatever came in the original packaging, the basic model with whatever manufacturer defects.

Distances always seem longer when you're heading out. Especially heading out for the first time, going anywhere takes forever.

It's a lost possibility, the sort that open up as you grow, then start closing down as you get older, as you make your choices or they're made for you.

How I managed to get this far without everyone seeing what a phony I am is a total mystery.

It's not how you fit, but what you can contribute. It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit, said Obama, quoting Truman, I think.

Uncertainty is a fact of life and an important part of what makes life lively. Risk is the spirit of courage you bring to things you care about. On the other hand, risking your own safety and stability won't necessarily help anybody else, either. There's courage, then there's ill-conceived idealism. Being stripped of your own safety and stability might make you more empathetic to other people's problems, but more likely it will just make you mean. Too much money makes people greedy, and too much security makes people spineless, but a basic amount of money and security makes it much easier for a person to be decent and good.

Everything I'd been doing, here at the start of adulthood, seemed suddenly kind of cheap. As if knowledge was a trick you played on yourself, a riddle to solve.

You put yourself out there, take on a thing like this, because you think that you should, or need to. Not because you want to, not at all because you want to, but because you are painfully aware of how greatly you would prefer to say no, to stay home, to climb into bed and read a book or watch something on your laptop, and you worry that's not healthy or good. Your natural inclinations seem counterproductive and not good. So you make yourself say yes, you force yourself, out of fear that you will live your whole life not "having lived" or whatever. But then here you are, living, and it's miserable! Not a meaningful corrective to your natural inclinations, just a terrible series of tortures with no redeeming value.

It's far too stressful when everything you're saying has to be exactly right all the time. To check yourself with every sentence. It's exhausting.

President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb. Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen: I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief. I am delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion. We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation's own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far out-strip our collective comprehension. No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only 5 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than 2 years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than 2 months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight. This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward-and so will space. William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage. If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it - we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace...

I wanted to talk about the problem of translation, how an idea clear in concept never remains so in practice, how social and economic forces remake ideas in their own image, how it’s not just capitalism that does this, it’s any system at all, and how Keynes and his ideas were a poignant example precisely because, even though he was in his own way radically optimistic, he wasn’t some dippy idealist.

This relatively hands-off style of rule practiced by the Eastern European empires was born of pragmatism. Social divisions were not a flaw to be overcome, but a tool to be used. In these realms, universal citizenship did not exist. People lived not as individuals but as parts of wider social estates, each of which came with its own set of privileges and prohibitions. Everyone was discriminated against to some extent, except for the sultan or czar. Everyone also had a function. To most people, before the arrival of modernity, the idea of equality before the law was unthinkable. What mattered most in life was to be allowed to fulfill their role undisturbed. Meanwhile, what mattered most to rulers was that the sum total of these various roles added up to them staying in power. For this, outsiders could be just as useful as locals and often showed themselves to be more dependable. The process of inviting helpful strangers into Eastern Europe began very early. Eastern European monarchs began looking abroad for talent in the Middle Ages Compared to Western Europe, the East was under-populated, lacking sities and the specialized craftsmen and traders who inhabited them. Eastern rulers also sat uneasily on the intersection of multiple frontiers: between pagan and Christian, Christian and Muslim, and Catholic and Orthodox. Because of this, they needed all the help they could get cultivating, defending, and administering their realms. In the eleventh century, A Hungarian king lectured his son about the usefulness of immigrants: 'As guests come from various areas and lands, so they bring with them various languages and customs, various examples and forms of armaments, which adorn and glorify the royal court. . . . For a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile. Therefore, my son, I order that you should feed them with goodwill and honor them so that they will prefer to live with you rather than inhabit any other place.' The young prince took his father's advice to heart. By the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Hungary harbored, within its ragile borders, groups of Jews, Muslims, Armenians, Slavs, Italians, Franks, Spaniards, and Germans

He delineates two kinds of needs. Absolute needs are the ones that can be adequately filled: food, shelter. Relative needs are the things you think you need in order to make yourself feel superior to

Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say. You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them.

Maybe the value of memories, as with any other commodity, is a function of scarcity. When you first notice that you have some, you have relatively few, so they seem to matter more. You are fascinated with the fact that you have them at all. Self-awareness. Growing up. But as you begin to accumulate memories with the years, their relative utility diminishes. You grow into a more realistic appreciation of their worth, then eventually even that dwindles. Finally, there are so many memories, and you are so used to having them around, so accustomed to their plentitude, that your demand curve approaches zero, and your past, your entire personal history, seems hardly worth the effort of remembering at all.

I felt present, prepared. I even knew enough to know that I could not hang on to this wonderfully enlightened perspective. This was just another attitude I was moving through, and my future self would cycle through all my other moods as regularly as ever.

Sometimes the pleasure of doing something isn't so much in the thing itself, but just in the fact that you're good at it.

Some rich people get rich because they're greedy, but some just like doing what they're good at, which happens to be making money. Which isn't the same as being greedy—it's more like a loophole in the social contract.

No, you'll feel bad that there were words coming out of you at all. That you let them escape your body, where they were at least safe. You exposed your words to the world. You feel exposed. Something has been given out that should have been kept in, because it was private. You are private.

Consciously or unconsciously, every day you decide which constructs to accept and which to question, about yourself and about the world. You can't question everything. You should work on yourself, be aware of yourself, try to better yourself, but you can't always treat yourself as the problem.

History is the nightmare from which I am trying to fall asleep.

A woman's autonomy is not just about rights or laws, she's saying. A woman literally needs her own room.

It must have been very sad. And confusing. The death of a very gifted person is strange for their friends, even if they haven't seen each other for a while. Trying to balance, emotionally, the cost to the world and the cost to yourself. The feeling that you lost something all your own, alongside the feeling that the culture, which is also yours, lost something as well. Two losses that overlap but are fundamentally different. That in some ways might even contend with one another, yet you have to make sense of them together.

The removal of private property is the big one, because it addresses what More sees as the central issue of humanity, the "parent of all plagues," his permanent problem, which is pride. "Pride" in the sense of needing to be better than other people, which I guess is more like vanity.

As long as there's private property, we are never going to get our acts together. We are always going to make ourselves and each other miserable wanting what everyone else has.

Ideology is a big bubble that surrounds you. It's all the assumptions you make about how to live, and you live so deeply inside these assumptions that it's very difficult, on a day-to-day basis, to remember which parts of your reality are natural and inevitable, versus which parts are things people just made up.

Ideology isn't a bad thing—we have to live inside something—but failure to recognize ideology for what it is, to bear in mind that society and culture are things we made up and can remake and improve, keeps us from changing those aspects of our lives that could be better.

Whenever my mind turns to my teenage years, which is almost never, but on the off times it occasionally does, and I try to decide whether or not thinking about those years is worth the energy, I experience something like the opposite of nostalgia. I am hit with a very strong sense that high school was dumb and embarrassing.

Everybody in the world is in the wrong place at the wrong time,

That for too long you'd held in your head many self-romanticizing notions about your position as an outsider, notions that allowed you to feel sure of yourself and important to yourself as long as you were never forced to share them—the notions—with anyone else? That as long as you didn't share this side of yourself with anyone else, it was all unadulterated potential, never forced to perform, never exposed to judgment.

Part of you clearly thinks they are right about you, even though they can't be, they have to be wrong or else your life's work is pointless, and that is a level of personal negation you cannot possibly survive.

Is it better to be right or to be useful? That is an argument philosophy and rhetoric have been having ever since.

Looking back, it's easy to pretend that I chose the path that led here, but I know it was more passive than that. I didn't lack courage, but what I really had was a sort of faith in the future that resembled, more than anything, a total absence of strategy.

It wasn't books or ideas that steered me, though. It wasn't goals and plans. It wasn't anything I discovered on my own that brought me here. It was people who I met at different times in different places. I won't say at the right or wrong times, just times.

Somehow, someday, I would become myself for the world, and someday, somehow, that would matter.

Probably it's a blessing, my terrible memory. The past is filled with moments I am happy to forget.