Quotes from Drew Gilpin Faust

Leadership is about moving people from where they are to where you hope they'll go.

I've had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.

If you don't pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don't begin with it.

Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren't any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification. You didn't necessarily even hear what the fate of your loved ones had been. It was up to their comrades to write and inform you.

Yankee private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty after Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found in the hands of a dead man he had stopped to help. After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God's grace he might lie.

Richmond's Mrs. William McFarland. "Let us remember that we belong to that sex which was last at the cross, first at the grave…Let us go now, hand in hand, to the graves of our country's sons, and as we go let our energies be aroused and our hearts be thrilled by this thought: It is the least thing we can do for our soldiers.

Death has no power to change moral qualities," he insisted in a Decoration Day speech in 1883. "Whatever else I may forget," the aging abolitionist declared, "I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.

A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future

Working women seemed "brazen," even to those like Lila Chunn who understood and encouraged necessary departures from tradition.

Joynes was careful to maintain the notion of separate spheres, even as he advocated significant change. A reformed system of women's schooling "should be based upon the idea that woman is woman, and not man-nor a butterfly," neither man's "plaything nor his rival.

For Cumming the Christian and feminine imperative of service far outweighed superficial notions of female delicacy. Employing one dimension of feminine ideology to dismiss another, Cumming despaired of her southern sisters, inhibited by false claims of modesty and respectability from undertaking desperately needed hospital work.45

Empowered by her strong sense of mission, Cumming was undaunted by male opposition. "It is useless," she proclaimed, "to say the surgeons will not allow us; we have our rights, and if asserted properly will get them. This is our right and ours alone.

She had, she declared, "no patience with women whom I hear telling what wonders they would do if they were only men, when I see so much of their legitimate work left undone.... I could name many things they could do," she continued in a revealing concession to prevailing anxieties about respectability, "without ever going into a ward."47

For many women like Sarah Morgan, clothing at once expressed desire and dread, possibility and impossibility. "If I was only a man!" she exclaimed. "I dont know a woman here who does not groan over her misfortune in being clothed in petticoats; why cant we fight as well as the men[?]

It is by the existence of Slavery, exempting so large a portion of our citizens from the necessity of bodily labor, that we have a greater proportion than any other people, who have leisure for intellectual pursuits, and the means of attaining a liberal education.

A knowledge of reading, writing, and the elements of arithmetic, is convenient and important to the free laborer, who is the transactor of his own affairs, and the guardian of his own interests—but of what use would they be to the slave?

Females are human and rational beings. They may be found of better faculties and better qualified to exercise political privileges and to attain the distinctions of society than many men; yet who complains of the order of society by which they are excluded from them?

As the Reverend Robert Barnwell emphasized in an address to the ladies of Charleston, "WITHOUT YOU, THIS WAR COULD NOT HAVE BEEN CARRIED ON, FOR THE GOVERNMENT WAS NOT PREPARED TO MEET ALL THAT WAS THROWN UPON IT.

An intelligent English traveller has characterized as the most miserable and degraded of all beings, "a masterless slave." And is not the condition of the laboring poor of other countries too often that of masterless slaves?

I've always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor - I never would have imagined that. Writing books - I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. - I'm not sure I would even have imagined that. I've lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.

I think that issues of gender have been discussed widely at Harvard. But I think I was chosen clearly on the merits, and I wish to operate as president on the merits. I think, on one level, we might say that I can affirm that women have the aptitude to do science or to do anything, including being president of Harvard.

We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.

I'd say Harvard graduates leave here with a sense of the possible and the limit - and a sense that there are no limits to what humans can do and that you can always be pushing, whatever limit you think might be there.

Albert Camus's 'La Peste' - 'The Plague' - had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from 'La Peste.'