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Yale Quotes

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Yale Quotes

“It is true that Harvard and Yale, as well as other upper-class institutions, offer free tuition, some cash scholarships, and nominal paid employment to the highest-ranking graduates of accredited secondary schools, without regard for the social class origins of these students. One can, it is true, meet a coal miner's or a farmer's son at Harvard, although it is a rare experience. The task of Yale and Harvard, however, is to mold these bright youngsters into unconscious servitors of the ruling class—as lawyers, as corporate scientists, as civil servants, as brokers, bankers, and clergymen. The enforced "democratic" mingling effected by the new house plans assures this result more positively now than ever, for in the past, many students were made to feel like pariahs by their exclusion from the quasi-aristocratic clubs.”

ClassCapitalismHarvardAristocracyYaleClass StruggleRuling ClassYale UniversityHarvard University
Book:America's 60 Families
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“Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice should create in the discerning male reader a deeply rooted concupiscence for Elizabeth Bennet that springs not from her vivacity or from her wit but from her unerring instinct to follow the deeply moral directives of her own character even against the influences and arguments of society, of convention, of seeming necessity, and of her friends and family. Properly read, Austen should be a form of pornography for the morally and spiritually discriminating man.”

Jane AustenYaleMoliereGerald WeaverGospel PrismMarie Colvin
Book:Gospel Prism
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“A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.”

LiteratureRighteousnessLatinoNovelsHomophobiaMurder MysteryHispanicYaleAntisemitismHolocaust DenialChicanoSergio TroncosoYale UniversityPhilosophy LiteratureHispanic IdentityLatino LiteraturePhilosophical NovelsRighteous Gentile
Book:The Nature of Truth
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“Mother once said I’d marry a quarryman. She looked at me as we washed clothes in the giant steel washtub, two pairs of water-wrinkled hands scrubbing and soaking other people’s laundry. We were elbow-deep in dirty suds and our fingers brushed under the foamy mounds. “Some mistakes are bound to be repeated,” she murmured We lived in Stony Creek, a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion. There were only three types of men here: Cottagers, rich, paunchy vacationers who swooped into our little Connecticut town in May and wiled away time on their sailboats through August; townsmen, small-time merchants and business owners who dreamed of becoming Cottagers; and quarrymen, men like my father, who worked with no thought to the future. The quarrymen toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week. They didn’t care that they smelled of granite dust and horses, grease and putty powder. They didn’t care about cleaning the crescents of grime from underneath their fingernails. Even when they heard the foreman’s emergency signal, three sharp shrieks of steam, they scarcely looked up from their work. In the face of a black powder explosion gone awry or the crushing finality of a wrongly cleaved stone, they remained undaunted. I knew why they lived this way. They did it for the granite. Nowhere else on earth did such stone exist—mesmerizing collages of white quartz, pink and gray feldspar, black lodestone, winking glints of mica. Stony Creek granite was so striking, it graced the most majestic of architecture: the Battle Monument at West Point, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh, the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The quarrymen of Stony Creek would wither and fall before the Cottagers, before the townsmen. But the fruits of their labor tethered them to a history that would stand forever. “You’ll marry one, Adele—I’m sure of it. His hands will be tough as buckskin, but you’ll love him regardless,” Mother told me, her breath warm in my ear as the steam of the wastewater rose around us. I didn’t say that she was wrong, that she couldn’t know what would happen. I’d learned that from the quarry. Pa was a stonecutter and he cut the granite according to rift and grain, to what he could feel with his fingertips and see with his eyes. But there were cracks below the surface, cracks that betrayed the careful placement of a chisel and the pounding of a mallet. The most beautiful piece of stone could shatter into a pile of riprap. It all depended on where those cracks teased and wound, on where the stone would fracture when forced apart. “Keep your eyes open, Adele. I don’t know who it will be—a steam driller, boxer, derrickman, powderman? Maybe a stonecutter like your father?” I turned away from her, feigning disinterest. “There’s no predicting, I told her.”

YaleHistorical NovelYale UniversityChandra PrasadOn Borrowed Wings
Author:Chandra Prasad
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“Sterling Memorial, the main library at Yale, had been built to resemble a Gothic cathedral, replete with stained glass, carved stonework, and a crenellated tower. Completed in 1930, the structure was "as near to modern Gothic as we dared" according to its architect, James Gamble Rogers. The use of the word "dare" always intrigued me. It suggested boundaries and infractions. There was, as I had come to expect at Yale, a scandalous story attached to the library's design. The benefactress, an old woman with failing eyesight, wanted a place of worship, and Yale wanted a library. Flouting its own motto, Lux et Veritas, Yale presented her with a structural trompe l'oeil. A cathedral in its outlines, but in its details a pantheon to books, where King Lear was a demigod and Huckleberry Finn a mischievous angel. The visual world had already become a greasy smudge to the benefactress, so the old biddy died never knowing the difference. Light and Truth, indeed.”

LibraryArchitectureGothicYaleFictionalCathedralLight And Truth
Book:Bitter in the Mouth
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“I played Lucky in Waiting for Godot at Yale and it was a thing that Stanislavski talks about: he says you don't need his 'method' if you can count on your inspiration and it was a moment of inspiration that came to me, not in rehearsal but on stage. It hit me right there in the middle of the play and it was great - it travelled into immediate communication.”

IfsNeedsPlayMomentsInspirationWaitingMiddleStageCommunicationLuckyMethodRehearsalYaleGodotWaiting For GodotStanislavski
Author:Sam Waterston
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“Butterfield 8, with its call-girl heroine working her way down the alphabet of men from Amherst to Yale, appeared at a very formative moment in my adolescence and impressed me forever with the persona of the prostitute, whom I continue to revere. The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.”

MenWayMomentsCultureGirlForeverClaimsVictimFeministImpressedAdolescenceProstitutionPersonaConquerorHeroinesAlphabetOutlawYale
Author:Camille Paglia
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“Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.”

MindEndsUseReadingVoiceSilenceAudiencePoetActressesTricksDramaticToneRomeAgonyHis LoveLecturesAbsentShakingGrimLecturerYaleMonologuesRuth
Author:Louis Auchincloss
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“Telling the complete story of VeggieTales would require much more time than we have before us tonight. Since this is Yale, I decided to craft a shorter version of the story, using very large words. Remembering though that I was kicked out of Bible College before I'd had a chance to learn many very large words, I concluded that my only remaining option was to tell the story simply, using simple words, and chance the consequences.”

StoriesRememberChanceSimpleCollegeConsequenceDecidedVersionsCraftsTonightMore TimeYaleSimple Words
Author:Phil Vischer
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“He's just intelligent-sort of a nerd, actually. He's the only brother I know who made a 1420 on the SAT. I don't think Chris Dudley did that, and Mr. Smarty Pants went to Yale. Kobe doesn't hang out. He doesn't go to the clubs. He doesn't ride around. He doesn't put rims on his car. He's just him. He's a sophisticated kid. Damn mature for his age.”

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Author:Shaquille O'Neal
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“In New Haven, Conn., when I was growing up, there were two sorts of Irish. There were the "drugstore cowboy" micks, who hung around the Elm Street poolroom over Longley's Lunch. And there were the earnest young Irishmen who fought their way up from the Grand Avenue saloonkeeper backgrounds of their fathers, went through Yale Law School, and have now found high place by the preferment of local politics or in the teaching profession.”

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Book:Studs Lonigan
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“Excellent Sheep is likely to makea lasting mark for three reasons. One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent twenty-four years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale.He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He's a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net. Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America.Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness.”

WantYearsTwoBookReasonAmericaThreeTermClassFourTeachingLandMiddleMarkTwentiesAimCriticsPassionateDetailsCornersDecadesSoccerExcellentLeagueWheelsMiddle ClassLastingFour YearsGraduatesSheepVividIvyAmerican LifeWeirdnessYaleColumbiaEntiretyIndictmentIvy LeagueStrikersUpper Middle ClassMiddle Class Life
Author:Dwight Garner
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“I wrote my first play, Uncommon Women and Others, in the hopes of seeing an all-female curtain call in the basement of the Yale School of Drama. A man in the audience stood up during a post show discussion and announced, “I can't get into this, it's all about girls.” I thought to myself, “Well, I've been getting in to Hamlet and Laurence of Arabia my whole life, so you better start trying.””

MenTryingFirstsWellsI CanPlayWholeShowsSchoolGirlAudienceSeeingDramaFemaleWhole LifePostsDiscussionCurtainsArabiaUncommonBasementsStood UpYaleCurtain Call
Author:Wendy Wasserstein
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“John Kerry's victory over Howard Dean has completely changed the presidential race around. Now instead of the rich white guy from Yale who lives in the White house facing off against the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Vermont, he may have to face the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Massachusetts. It's a whole different game.”

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Author:Jay Leno
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“I have memories of being in Yale five years ago. It was December and so damn cold that while professing love to my leading lady and singing a Bollywood ditty which went something like this, Kabhie alvida na kehna – my mouth froze itself to death. I say death because as I inched closer to kiss her, mouthing the words kabhi alvida na… my mouth and jaw just locked.”

YearsMemoriesFiveColdKissingSingingMouthsYears AgoDamnFive YearsLockedDecemberYaleBollywoodLeading Ladies
Author:Shahrukh Khan
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“Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline and who manage to grow up before they blow up are invited to join the Yale faculty. Within the university they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers ... it is a place where the world's hostility to curiosity can be defied.”

MenWorldTryingChildrenAgeGrowsAnswersGrowing UpGoes OnDisciplineAskingCuriosityUniversityBlowManageFacultyInvitedHostilityMonarchyParentalYale
Author:Edmund Morgan
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