Quotes About Scholarship

Two motives urge fans to obsession with their sports. One is the need-—through the appeal of vicarious success—-to identify with winners. The other is to sanction, through pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship, a claim to expertise on the subject. Sports give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore and to watch innumerable commentators on TV do the same.

I definitely had a top-notch education.

Reading an endless litany of study after study-one article found this, and another experiment found this, and another study found this-is like watching laundry spinning in a dryer, except that something good eventually comes out of a dryer!

In our country, learned ignorance is on the rise.

The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it.

La connaissance historique est taillée sur le patron de documents mutilés.

Ce qui m'intéressait était l'érudition : elle est un « jeu de vérité » amusant, qui découvre, déchiffre, explique ou explicite l'inconnu ou le méconnu ; elle est donc prête à croire que toute « vérité » reçue a des chances d'être fausse, au risque de déplaire, de mettre l'opinion au défi.

Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.

What these thinkers, chroniclers, and interpreters have written about, how they have theorized their scholarly endeavors, and their approaches and methodologies have inevitably been informed and shaped by the times in which they existed.

Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it.

Pick up most books and articles on Washington from 1932 or earlier, and generally, with a few exceptions, you will read about George Washington the Christian. That began to change with the iconoclastic scholarship of the mid-twentieth century that sought to tear down the traditional understanding of our nation and its origins.

The point of all this is that the book of Exodus as we know it simply could not be as old as the thirteenth century BCE, and could not have been written by Moses.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

As researchers and experimenters, scholars and theorists, German academics — good bourgeois virtually all of them — made signal contributions to human mastery. But as citizens they failed to claim mastery over their own fate. The way they chose to confine their lives to their professional advancement was a kind of division of labor — scholarship to the scholar, politics to the politician. But it was also a fateful division of power.