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Quotes About Humanities

I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities.
~ Joshua Lederberg
What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.
~ Ellen Ullman
My education, according to the tradition of the Jesuit school which I attended, had been centered on the 'ancient humanities', and I was strongly attracted to the more literary branches.
~ Christian de Duve
I trained in medicine after pursuing an academic career in the humanities, mainly because of my interest in the relationship between mind and body, and between mind and brain.
~ Iain McGilchrist
Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman's inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.
~ Stanley Fish
In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve.
~ Stefan Collini
My assumption, which goes against the orthodox view of knowledge, is that there is no direct correlation between objects and knowledge and that understanding is constantly recreated. This work is thus part of a growing body of literature in the social sciences and humanities that questions the possibility of a singular truth.
~ Stefan Tanaka
I should say the summit of contemporary university knowledge in two fields, mathematics and the humanities. That's no joke!
~ Boris Pasternak
Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves. All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting.
~ Sylvia Plath
In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences.
~ Kai Bird
El Posmodernismo surgió como una fuerza social entre los intelectuales, porque en las humanidades la Contrailustración derrotó a la Ilustración. La debilidad del discurso de la Ilustración para explicar la razón era su defecto irremediable.
~ Stephen Hirst
In my junior year of high school, I went to a boarding school for the arts: a school called the Governor's School for The Arts and Humanities. It was basically a mini-Juilliard - an intense training conservatory for the arts.
~ Teyonah Parris
A lot of the arguments about religion going on at the moment spring from a rather inept understanding of religious truth Our notion changed during the early modern period when we became convinced that the only path to any kind of truth was reason. That works beautifully for science but doesn't work so well for the humanities. Religion is really an art form and a struggle to find value and meaning amid the ghastly tragedy of human life.
~ Karen Armstrong
For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
~ Ian Mcewan
In fact, everyone he's passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
~ Ian Mcewan
As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.
~ Henry Giroux
In Greenville, we were blessed to have lots of youth arts programs. I changed middle schools to go to an arts middle school. Then, when high school came, I went to normal high school for a little while before auditioning for the Governor's School for Arts and Humanities.
~ Danielle Brooks
What is needed is a biblically rooted,30 patristically guided,31 ecclesially located, and publicly engaged theology, done in critical conversation with the sciences and the various disciplines of the humanities, at the center of which is the question of the flourishing life.
~ Miroslav Volf
Historians do not have the imaginative freedoms of fiction writers, but we can learn from novelists' efforts to imagine other ways of seeing. More engagement with the environmental humanities, which try to gaze on the agency and interconnectivity of all things, will help.
~ Nancy Langston
The professor argues against measuring effectiveness in the shallow short-term in the fierce humanities, for teaching that seeks not merely learning, but unlearning, that seeks to unsettle knowledge and assumptions in ways more fundamental than any exam can or should test.
~ Cary Nelson
All this time I've been talking about the human sciences and don't even know what these human sciences are, don't have the slightest clue, he said, I thought, been talking about philosophy and don't have a clue about philosophy, been talking about existence and don't have a clue about it, he said. Our starting point is always that we don't know anything about anything and don't even have a clue about it, he said
~ Thomas Bernhard
Decades later, universities in Sri Lanka likewise had "a backlog of unemployed graduates" who had specialized in the humanities and the social sciences.
~ Thomas Sowell
Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.
~ Ken Robinson
Progress in science and technology is real, but it builds on past truths without rejecting them. Computers don't have to be re-invented in order to keep getting better; innovations expand what they already do. Knowledge accumulates, so it can increase. Scientists and engineers know this, but artists, authors, and philosophers keep trying to start over from ground zero in the humanities. Thus, they don't really progress—they become primitive.
~ Gene Edward Veith