Quotes About Humanities

The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.

The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.

the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

Leonardo had a free-range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities. His knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in The Last Supper, and on a page of anatomical drawings depicting the dissection of lips he drew the smile that would reappear in the Mona Lisa. He knew that art was a science and that science was an art.

Von Neumann was another innovator who stood at the intersection of the humanities and sciences.

It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.

In the '60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I'd written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies.

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that's a great loss.

I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.

It is wrong, I think, to deal with the past as if it can be simply departed from or "solved," or brought to "closure." It is discouraging to see the conservatives treat history as one of the "humanities" that can be dispensed with or ignored by hardheaded realists. It is both discouraging and amusing to be assured by the liberals that the past can be risen above by superior persons who, if they had been Thomas Jefferson, would have owned no slaves.

What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents' nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world.

THE DISCIPLINE OF history is generally not considered to be a science, but something closer to the humanities. At best, history is classified among the social sciences, of which it rates as the least scientific.

Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors. The whole discovery of the psychological, whose complexity can extend ad-infinitum, comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the workers), of incarcerating to death (the detained), of fattening to death (the animals).

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

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.

I'm a liberal arts junkie.

Lo que intento decir es que pienso que esto forma parte de lo que se supone que significa en realidad ese mantra de que las humanidades «te enseñan a pensar»: ser un poco menos arrogante, tener cierta «conciencia crítica» de mí mismo y de mis certidumbres… porque un gran porcentaje de las cosas de las que suelo estar automáticamente seguro resultan ser completamente erróneas y fruto de engañarme a mí mismo.

People are always saying the humanities are dead so it's strange how many conferences there are. (p. 203-204)

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false.

The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.

I always did plays, and when I went to NYU - and I didn't go to Tisch, the theater school, because I was like, 'Well, acting's not realistic. You can't make a career out of it.' So I just studied general studies and humanities at NYU, but I was doing plays while I was there. So I was sort of cheating.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

Postmodernism is part of a recent tradition in the humanities that opposes the idea that language should be analyzed as a system used to represent, or stand for; objects and situations in the world. This anti-representationalist view of language influenced a lot of literary theory, as well as other humanistic disciplines, in the latter part of the twentieth century. Postmodernism is a spectacular outgrowth of that line of thought.

If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world's poor, the problems of Australia's Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato's time.