Robert Strauss Quotes

Success is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.

It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired you quit when the gorilla is tired.

… understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another.” Claude Levi-Strauss

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the people you need to concentrate on.

(Decades later, Stravinsky snapped to Robert Craft, “I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality.”)

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

The task of getting rid of Oppenheimer was far too important to leave to the clownish, sensation-seeking senator from Wisconsin. It would require careful planning and skillful maneuvering. After leaving Hoover, Strauss returned to his office and wrote to Senator Robert Taft, urging him to block McCarthy if he attempted to launch an investigation of Oppenheimer. It would be “a mistake,” he wrote. “In the first place some of the evidence will not stand up.

Bart joins most scholars in accepting the verdict of David Friedrich Strauss11 and Albert Schweitzer12 that the Gospel of John is an almost purely literary work. It may be free creation, or it may have been a thorough rewrite of the Synoptics (sometimes critiquing them). For our purposes it doesn’t really matter which theory is correct. Either way, it is exceedingly dubious to appeal to John for historical information about Jesus, as Bart sometimes does.

Oppenheimer’s friend the syndicated columnist Joe Alsop was outraged by the decision. “By a single foolish and ignoble act,” he wrote Gordon Gray, “you have cancelled the entire debt that this country owes you.” Joe and his brother Stewart soon published a 15,000-word essay in Harper’s lambasting Lewis Strauss for a “shocking miscarriage of justice.” Borrowing from Emile Zola’s essay on the Dreyfus affair, “J’Accuse,” the Alsops titled their essay “We Accuse!” In florid language they argued that the AEC had disgraced, not Robert Oppenheimer, but the “high name of American freedom.” There were obvious similarities: Both Oppenheimer and Capt. Alfred Dreyfus came from wealthy Jewish backgrounds and both men were forced to stand trial, accused of disloyalty. The Alsops predicted that the long-term ramifications of the Oppenheimer case would echo those of the Dreyfus case: “As the ugliest forces in France engineered the Dreyfus case in swollen pride and overweening confidence, and then broke their teeth and their power on their own sordid handiwork, so the similar forces in America, which have created the climate in which Oppenheimer was judged, may also break their teeth and power in the Oppenheimer case.

Semiotiek 211 was een specialistisch vak dat werd gedoceerd door een voormalige rebel van het instituut Engelse taal- en letterkunde. Michael Zipperstein was tweeëndertig jaar geleden als aanhanger van het New Criticism naar Brown gekomen. Hij had drie generaties studenten de gewoonte bijgebracht teksten zorgvuldig te lezen, te analyseren en te interpreteren zonder aandacht voor de biografie van de auteur, totdat hij in 1975 tijdens een sabbatical in Parijs een levensveranderende openbaring kreeg: tijdens een diner maakte hij kennis met Roland Barthes en bij de cassoulet werd hij tot het nieuwe geloof bekeerd. [...] Hij bedolf zijn studenten onder de leeslijsten: naast de grote semiotische kanonnen - Derrida, Eco, Barthes - moesten ze zich voor Semiotiek 211 door hele stapels achtergrondteksten heen worstelen, van Sarrasine van Balzac tot bundels van Semiotext(e) tot gefotokopieerde capita selecta van E.M. Cioran, Robert Walser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Peter Handke en Carl van Vechten. [...] Door dat esoterische onderzoek, en door Zippersteins kale goeroehoofd en witte baard, kregen zijn studenten het gevoel dat ze geestelijk waren doorgelicht en nu - althans twee uur lang op dinsdagmiddag - deel uitmaakten van een literaire elite.

Strauss finally had Oppenheimer exactly where he wanted him. Yet Oppie seems to have reacted calmly to the news, politely asking all the right questions, trying to explore his options. Thirty-five minutes after entering Strauss’ office, Oppenheimer rose to leave, telling Strauss that he was going to consult with Herb Marks. Strauss offered him the use of his chauffeur-driven Cadillac and Oppenheimer—distraught (outward appearances to the contrary)—foolishly accepted. But instead of going to Marks’ office, he directed the driver to the law offices of Joe Volpe, the former counsel to the AEC who together with Marks had given him legal advice during the Weinberg trial. Soon afterwards, Marks joined them and the three men spent an hour weighing Robert’s options. A hidden microphone recorded their deliberations. Anticipating that Oppenheimer would consult with Volpe, and unconcerned about violating the legal sanctity of client-lawyer privilege, Strauss had arranged in advance for Volpe’s office to be bugged.20 The hidden microphones in Volpe’s office allowed Strauss, through the transcripts provided to him, to monitor the discussion as to whether Oppenheimer ought to terminate his consulting contract or fight the charges in a formal hearing. Oppie was clearly undecided and anguished. Late that afternoon, Anne Wilson Marks came by and drove her husband and Robert back to their Georgetown home. On the way, Oppenheimer said, “I can’t believe what is happening to me.” That evening, Robert took the train back to Princeton to consult with Kitty.

Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.

Robert Faurisson

I once sheepishly asked a prominent Evangelical apologist, with his PhD in New Testament, if he had ever chanced to read Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined. He had not. Things began to become clear to me. He didn't know that all his trusty arguments had been thoroughly refuted many decades before he was born.

I spent New Year’s at Lucinda’s for our annual, current-celebrity movie/TV series-sleepover marathon. We’d done this together every year since eighth grade, because neither of us ever got invited to the cool parties. Previous years had featured Zac Efron, Orlando Bloom, Robert Pattison and Brad Pitt (even though he’s kind of old, he’s still, well, wow).

Robert Strauss, the former Democratic chairman who died last year, once said every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself.

As Strauss demonstrated with inescapable lucidity many decades ago, the two nativity stories of Matthew and Luke disagree at almost every point, one exception being the location of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. [...] Matthew assumes Jesus was born in the home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, and that they only relocated to Nazareth in Galilee after taking off for Egypt to avoid Herod the Great's persecution. Luke knows nothing of this but instead presupposes that Mary and Joseph lived in Galilee and "happened" to be in Bethlehem when the hour struck for Jesus' birth because the Holy Couple had to be there to register for a Roman taxation census. [...] For the moment, my point is to suggest that Luke and Matthew both seem to have been winging it, just as they did with their genealogies. They began with an assumption and tried to connect the dots. This time, their common assumption was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Whence this assumption? Was there historical memory that Jesus was born there? Hardly; if there had been, we cannot account for Mark's utter lack of knowledge of the fact. No, it seems much more natural, much less contrived, to suggest that Matthew and Luke alike simply inferred from their belief in Jesus' Davidic lineage that he must have been born in Bethlehem. [...] Matthew and Luke both placed the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem because they mistakenly thought prophecy demanded it. They went to work trying to connect the dots with narrative or historical verisimilitude, but with limited success.

In 1968, the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy completed an assassination trilogy that struck many as the tragic if natural outgrowth of an era of unstoppable passion and violence.

Sukces przypomina trochę zapasy z gorylem. Nie przestajesz, kiedy jesteś zmęczony. Rezygnujesz dopiero, gdy zmęczony jest goryl.

Levi Strauss supports the anti-gun lobbyists. We wore Wrangler or Lee, but Sarah thought they made her butt look big so she wore Levi’s. You had to know her to appreciate