Phi Beta Kappa Quotes

We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.

Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw -- I don't say she will but she can.

I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the non-plused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: "Fine.

In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, “I can’t get my students to read whole books anymore.”10 Hayles teaches English; the students she’s talking about are students of literature.

I’m like Mary Annette, but I’m not a marionette. Who’s Mary Annette? The first woman of color to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa. What color was she? Wikipedia didn’t have a picture, so probably either blue or green—let’s just call it turquoise.

But if anybody had outwitted Al Ulbrickson, it was his own coxswain—the short kid with his own Phi Beta Kappa key.

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.

For some, life may be about neatly building on Phi Beta Kappa or an Ivy League degree. More often, identities and careers are made not out of college majors and GPAs but out of a couple of door-opening pieces of identity capital

Why some brilliant people are failures. I’ve been close for many years to a person who qualifies as a genius, has high abstract intelligence, and is Phi Beta Kappa. Despite this very high native intelligence, he is one of the most unsuccessful people I know. He has a very mediocre job (he’s afraid of responsibility). He has never married (lots of marriages end in divorce). He has few friends (people bore him). He’s never invested in property of any kind (he might lose his money). This man uses his great brainpower to prove why things won’t work rather than directing his mental power to searching for ways to succeed.

There are many faces to the horrors of war-- decimation, mutilation, barbarity, and, of course, death itself. But one of the most savage and dehumanizing consequences of armed conflict is the prison system that springs up to house enemy combatants--and ordinary citizens too. These hellish camps encapsulate the lowest depths of human depravity; ruled by violence and degeneracy, political prisoners are forced to endure unthinkable conditions and unchecked cruelty--all without any chance of reprieve. Uta Christensen's latest novel, Caught: Surviving the Turbulent River of Life, chronicles this appalling consequence of war, weaving a narrative of atrocity that, despite its artful inventions and complex characters, is so starkly based on grim realities... that one cannot help but shudder. Caught tells the story of Janos, a young German boy kidnapped by the Nazis during WWII--and forced into a Russian prison camp. There, Janos must survive against all odds, fighting off starvation and death at every turn as the years march on... and he becomes a man. It is, in fact, within the hardships of this very crucible, that Janos thrives, overcoming the frailties and ignobilities of existence to discover friendship, compassion, and love--making him into the apotheosis of an upstanding, self-reliant citizen: a true model to all his fellow countrymen. Told in flashbacks, Caught: Surviving the Turbulent River of Life explores the intricate nature of suffering and memory, delving into the complexities of how the past--even the most vicious episodes--informs the present... and the very nature of the self. Uta Christensen, with striking prose and a poetic sensibility, brings the darker chapters of history to life in such a way that one is instantly captivated by a concurrent horror and pity, a sense of tragedy, but too a catharsis in overcoming, in human resilience and beauty itself. A truly breathtaking novel, Caught is a tour de force of literary perfection; poignant, unremitting, and painfully real, this book is essential reading for all those willing to face hard truths--and grow from them.

Jeff Bezos, who is the founder and CEO of Amazon and the richest person in modern history, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and in the firm’s early days recruited employees from among American Rhodes Scholars studying at Oxford.

He had discovered too that the majority of those Negroes who spent the greater part of their time professing a love of race in one breath, and denouncing whites in another, was, for the most part, insincere and ignorant demagogues, no matter how many Phi Beta Kappa keys they strung across their vests, or how many academic degrees they initialed behind their names. They

An economist,” he told them, “is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.

college honors, honors in my major, and Phi Beta Kappa.

White-supremacist-patriarchal-heteronormative-capitalism socializes us to aspire to “good Negro” status. It convince little Black girls from East Oakland to graduate from Howard—summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, to pledge the oldest Black sorority, to earn PhDs, to be in the “right” rooms…” - Melina Abdullah

(...) the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

Bifurcated?” I looked up at her. “I couldn’t tell you, Doc. I don’t speak Phi Beta Kappa.” “Divided, Dominick. Separated. Simultaneously sympathetic and repelled.