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Humanities Quotes

Browse 36 quotes about Humanities.

Humanities Quotes

“What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.”

ImaginationJusticeTraditionUniversityAcademiaRadicalismHumanities2010RembrandtRadical PoliticsReactionary PoliticsArthur RimbaudMargaret ThatcherPublic UniversityTuition Fees Uk2010 Uk Student Protests
Author:Terry Eagleton
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“The analogy I want to make here is this. That if the ostensibly divinely ordained caste organizing principle of the Europe's feudal-Christian order was fundamentally secured by the Absolutism of its Scholastic order of knowledge, (including its pre-Columbus geography of the earth and its pre-Copernicus Christian-Ptolemaic astronomy), the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic organizing principle of our Liberal Humanist own, as expressed in the empirical hierarchies of race and class (together with the kind of gender role allocation between men and women needed to keep this systemic hierarchies in place), is as fundamentally secured by our present disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences.”

HumanHumanities
Book:No Humans Involved
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“The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization--not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.”

LifeTruthHumanityEssaysHumanities
Book:Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations
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“WONDERLAND It is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonder That sets them on their initial quest for truth. The more doors you open, the smaller you become. The more places you see and the more people you meet, The greater your curiosity grows. The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander. The more you wander, the greater the wonder. The more you quench your thirst for wonder, The more you drink from the cup of life. The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become. The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel. And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding. And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences. And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective, And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance. Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel. And the smaller you feel, the greater you become. The more you see, the more you love -- The more you love, the less walls you see. The more doors you are willing to open, The less close-minded you will be. The more open-minded you are, The more open your heart. And the more open your heart, The more you will be able to Send and receive -- Truth and TRUE Unconditional LOVE.”

LoveLifePhilosophyWisdomTruthPoetryPurposeHumanityLanguagePeaceUnderstandingGrowthJusticeEducationAttitudeWonderFamilyKnowledgeDestinyLearningWiseWonderfulDoorsMysteryJourneyTeachingIgnorancePoetPerspectiveMoralityPoemTravelLivingRacismExperiencePrejudiceInternationalSeekingGoodCuriousWanderPoemsAweGreatStorySpiritual GrowthUnconditional LoveMoralsHuman ConditionThirstWorld PeaceAngleQuestionsOutlookLife PurposeFeelSeeGlobal CitizenTravelingQuestGlobalSmallSuzy KassemTravellingQuenchWorld CitizenMysteriesLanguagesPerspectivesCountriesInternationalismCulturesCuriousityHumanitiesWondermentCross Cultural UnderstandingTruth SeekingCup Of LifeCuriosity GrowsAlice And Wonderland
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“However they arrive, asylum seekers, immigrants, and refugees reach with outstretched hands toward safer, more promising shores. Welcoming these wayfarers rekindles our humanity and heals our broken parts. Only within the cords that bind us together do we find answers to age-old questions about despair and enmity, fear and alienation, justice and hope.”

InspirationalJusticeCompassionImmigrantsRefugeesHumanities
Book:How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted
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“Перерахую здібності, що пов'язані з гуманітарними науками та мистецтвом: здатність до критичного мислення; здатність відірватися від приватних інтересів і поглянути на світові проблеми з точки зору "громадянина світу"; і, нарешті, здатність співчутливо ставитися до труднощів іншої людини.”

EmpathyCritical ThinkingCitizenHumanities
Book:Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
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“Never was the two cultures stand-off more apparent than here. In Gunn’s poem, a new neighbour (an outsider) wants them evicted because of their detrimental effect on property prices. She might well have been an academic: in more than thirty years in the humanities side of universities, the attitude towards those skills which I encountered was mainly one of ignorant, patronizing condescension. Just occasionally a student from the science side would dismantle a car in a campus car park only to be moved on by the authorities, as were Gunn’s auto freaks. Among the younger academics, disdain for this culture verged on contempt because of its supposedly obsolete ‘masculinist’ values. Those same academics were also the ones quick to brand any intense friendship between the men of this ‘masculinist’ culture as repressed homosexuality. In truth, sometimes it might have been, and yet sometimes it almost certainly wasn’t: some of the most loyal and selfless friendships I’ve ever known were between working-class young men who, insofar as anyone can ever be sure of these things, really were straight.”

ClassUniversityHumanities
Book:Desire: A Memoir
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“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better. This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

ArtPoetryMusicHumanities
Book:Autobiography Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Descent of Man A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World Coral Reefs Voyage of the Beagle Origin of Species Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals
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“Незабаром всі країни світу почнуть виготовляти покоління корисних машин, а не повноцінних громадян, що здатні самостійно мислити, критикувати традиційний уклад та розуміти значення страждань і досягнень інших людей.”

ThinkingSocietyCitizenHumanities
Book:Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
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“A folyosón Enikő az egyik diákjába, Király Robiba botlik, aki egy hónapok óta ottfelejtett asztalon ül, és fintorogva olvas egy nem olyan régen megjelent novelláskötetet. Enikő régóta ismeri Robit, a fiú évek óta látogatja a szemináriumait, még most is, pedig így heted-nyolcadéves hallgatóként már megválogatja, hogy hova tesz még be a lábát. (262.)”

FeminismAcademiaHumanitiesHungarian LiteratureBölcsészlét
Book:Mágneshegy
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“Only Backward Minority of Earth (Naskaristana 2543) Eurocentrism is the biggest fraud in education, eurocentrism is the antithesis of education. The only minority that has historically caused irreparable damage to the world are the white people, yet you confuse every little mediocre literature from such backward population as default knowledge - and by act of conscience if a braveheart white defies the status quo, you declare them as woke infected. First sign of an educated mind - you don't start a conversation on philosophy mentioning greeks, you don't start a conversation on poetry mentioning the english. White people discovered nothing but other people's land, other people's science, other people's philosophy - Europe is the real footnote in the history of knowledge, till you understand what this means in your bones, your philosophy is just as fictional as your theology.”

PhilosophyEducationKnowledgeDecolonizationCultural AppropriationEurocentrismErasureHumanitiesAncient CivilizationIndigenous Knowledge
Book:Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
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“We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.”

WritingAestheticsCivicsEssayHumanitiesCitizhenshipIntellectual Work
Book:The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities
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“Entre los medios, no sólo de pulir la lengua, sino de extender y generalizar todos los tramos de ilustración, pocos habrá más importantes que el de simplificar la ortografía, como que de ella depende la adquisición más o menos fácil de los dos artes primeros que són como los cimientos sobre los que descansa todo el edificio de la literatura y de las ciencias: leer y escribir.”

WritingLiteratureLiteraturaEscrituraLecturaHumanitiesOrthographyHumanidadesOrtografíaIlustración
Author:Luis Bello
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“إن القرآن لم يذر وسيلة موصلة إلى إنعاش العقل وتحرير الفكر إلا وتذرع بها، فهو إذا تحاكم فإلى العقل، وإذا حاج فبحكم العقل، وإذا سخط فعلى معطلي العقل، وإذا رضي فعن أولي العقل”

ReligionHumanities
Book:أثر القرآن في تحرير الفكر البشري
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“But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.”

ArtHistoryCommunicationMeaningContentArt HistorySymbolSignIconographyHumanitiesVisual ArtsVisual CommunicationIconology
Book:Meaning in the Visual Arts
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“The fate of the humanities faculty in the burgeoning world of for-profit higher education is easy to predict, but painful to contemplate. Universities that, by virtue of their very mission, validate economic efficiency and productivity above all else also sanction apathy toward the humanities. (p. 97)”

HumanitiesFor Profit Education
Book:The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
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“Why is it that the difference between humans and animals is so insisted on? If this were a simple division as between different subjects then why is there so much impassioned writing about it? Why need humans insist on their wearisome catalogue of language, writing, works of the imagination, conceptual analysis and so forth, as differing them from other animals? Why do people angrily dispute any suggestion that, for example, ants build cities or that chimpanzees love their young, rather than that they follow instincts which do not include human feelings? Why the grudging admission by scientists, only within this century, that animals feel pain? Why do our modern languages slip so easily into animalistic words like bestial or feral to indicate a moral distinction between us and them? Why are internalised thoughts so embedded that set animal and spiritual at different ends of a spectrum? The answer is easily given. It is because of the still inescapably present inheritance of religious thought. ~ Peter Ellis”

HumansScienceReligionHumanismTheologyAnimalsHumanitiesAnimal Behaviour
Book:Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals
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