Yale Founder Quotes

No nation influenced American thinking more profoundly than Germany, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Richard Ely, Richard Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American liberalism were among the nine thousand Americans who studied in German universities during the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the six first officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. By their own testimony, these intellectuals felt "liberated" by the experience of studying in an intellectual environment predicated on the assumption that experts could mold society like clay. No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler", writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought". Bismarck's "top-down socialism", which delivered the eight-hour workday, healthcare, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old", he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward", he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system . . . the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.

Timothy Dwight, a chaplain in the Connecticut Continental Brigade during the Revolution and later president of Yale College, would write: "The people of New-England have always had, and have by law always been required to have, arms in their hands. Every man is, or ought to be, in the possession of a musket." Yet he did not know of "a single instance, in which arms have been the instruments of carrying on a private quarrel."121

I didn’t invent my regimen from whole cloth. It’s built on a foundation of scientific data generated by leading medical professionals and other experts in the field: people like Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and author of The China Study, a groundbreaking book published in 2005 that examines the close relationship between the consumption of animal proteins and the onset of chronic and degenerative illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and obesity. In one of the largest epidemiological studies ever conducted, Professor Campbell and his peers determined that a plant-based, whole-food diet can minimize and actually reverse the development of these chronic diseases. Equally influential is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. A former surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, as well as a Yale-trained rower who garnered Olympic gold at the 1956 Melbourne Summer Games, Dr. Esselstyn concludes from a twenty-year nutritional study that a plant-based, whole-food diet can not only prevent and stop the progression of heart disease, but also reverse its effects.

My co-founder’s background in sales was immensely helpful in our early days, driving home the importance of approaching each interaction as a sales effort in which you had to know your audience, frame your pitch accordingly, and most importantly, never accept “no” for an answer. Instead of being discouraged by non-believers, it is the entrepreneur’s job to engage his or her passion for the concept and creatively adapt it to overcome any hurdles.

Let excellence guide your choice of co-founders, advisors, employees, and personal experiences. In selecting team members and investors ask the question: Have they seen excellence in the kinds of activities that matter to your company? #4

It took me awhile to understand, but Jim recognized that startups are really about people. He was betting on the founders rather than on any one idea we presented.

James Pierpont, one of the founders of Yale University.

Five months later, July 28, he married the beautiful Sarah Pierrepont, then seventeen, the daughter of the Rev. James Pierrepont, of New Haven, one of the founders, and a prominent trustee, of Yale College, and on her mother’s side, the great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, “the father of the Connecticut churches.

Congregationalist minister Timothy Dwight, who had been a chaplain in the Continental army during the Revolution and served as president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, synthesized American concepts of arms possession as a right and a duty in his 1821 commentary of American life and institutions as follows: In both New-England, and New-York, every man is permitted, and in some, if not all the States, is required to possess fire arms. To trust arms in the hands of the people at large has, in Europe, been believed . . . to be an experiment, fraught only with danger. Here by a long trial it has been proved to be perfectly harmless: neither public nor private evils having ever flowed from this source, except in instances of too little moment to deserve any serious regard.