Quotes About Scholars

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning…

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.

Scholars say that ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and deny the shadow side of things (think of a Fourth of July parade), whereas true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named (think of a true Eucharist). In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies.

That's a relief. I hate it when scholars disagree.

European scholars had translated into Latin two important Arabic manuscripts, written by the ninth-century Persian mathematician Ab? 'Abdall?h Muammad ibn M?s? al-Khw?rizm? (ca. 780–ca. 850 CE).

They were part of an international community of scholars .... There was an atmosphere of feverish excitement among them as they discovered and explored the treasure-house of Arab learning, and they had casually welcomed Jack as a student: they admitted into their circle anyone who understood what they were doing and shared their enthusiasm for it.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

advice to his children) Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

M]ore and more scholars are ready to take the Chinese economy neither as an ad hoc, patchy, and half-measure free-market economy, nor as a chaotic, corrupt, and fading command system, but as an economic, social, and political alternative in the making, an experiment whose provisionality proves to be the norm.

Scholars, notably Western scholars, are often more eager to gauge the extent to which...economic liberalization dismantles socialism and nurtures capitalism than analyze how socialism, a system created as an alternative to the lack of economic democracy in modern capitalism, is revitalized and, in its more decentred, de-essentialized, flexible forms, becomes an integral, constitutive part of the daily reality of Chinese economic, social, political, and cultural life.

The name Chipangu is the transliteration of the Chinese name which modern scholars write Chi-pen-kue, by which Japan was then known in China.

highly credentialed conservative religion scholars and thinkers

Reinterpreting sacred texts in the name of fidelity to God and kindness to neighbor is precisely what the Talmud does, and many Jewish scholars do, to this day.

Oh, yes! Some scholars believe the motif was used as a means of illustrating the Egyptian belief in resurrection. It is an obvious parallel with the butterfly's own metamorphosis, is it not?

It used to be that god was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.

Reputable scholars might have denied its authenticity, but there are always other scholars who disagree--and people will believe what they want to believe, never mind the evidence. If there is anything life has taught me, it is that there is no idea so absurd that someone will not accept it as truth, and no action so bizarre that it will not be justified in the eyes of a true believer.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Epigenetics is a discipline that relies more on speculation than genuine scientific understanding. Nevertheless, scholars of race and racism would do well to keep a wary eye on epigenetic research, as this is an avenue whereby many researchers will attempt to resurrect the biological concept of race. Defining 'race': is there a consensus that race is a social construct?

Day care was intended from the start to be a weak system, as scholars of the history of childcare tell me, like a punishment for needing care because a woman didn't have a husband or some other means of support.

There are all kinds of historians and scholars who say that Brutus could have been a son of Caesar. That's definitely a possibility. He's a generation younger than Caesar.

Scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.

To prove that degrees, per se, are worthless. Often they are honorifics of true scientists or learned scholars or inspired teachers. Much more frequently they are false faces for overeducated jackasses.