Fiske Quotes

#1. A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#2. The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times. (John Fiske)

David Baldacci

#3. She sounds... cruel."
"There were many sides to Grace," Fiske said.
...
Beatrice leaned closer to the screen. "Grace made her own husband, Nathaniel Harford, an Outcast.

Jude Watson

#4. The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakspere [sic], and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#5. No damsel was ever in more distress, no dray horse more flogged, no defenseless child more drunkenly abused than the English language today. And

Robert Hartwell Fiske

#6. The way we make sense of a realistic text is through the same broad ideological frame as the way we make sense of our social experience or rather, the way we are made sense of by the discourses of our culture.

John Fiske

#7. You must make your own blunders, must cheerfully accept your own mistakes as part of the scheme of things.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#8. One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins everywhere.

John Fiske

#9. People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#10. Be reflective ... and stay away from the theater as much as you can. Stay out of the theatrical world, out of its petty interests, its inbreeding tendencies, its stifling atmosphere, its corroding influence. Once become

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#11. Strange priests are they who never straightly walk But all aslant through sideways passage stalk Who never seek their goals in forward lines But move askew as fraught with sly designs

Willard Fiske

#12. An actor is exactly as big as his imagination.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#13. My design was not so much to contribute new facts as to shape the narrative in such a way as to emphasize relations of cause and effect that are often buried in the mass of details.

John Fiske

#14. I have never known a movement in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various uplifting activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#15. Among the most disheartening and dangerous of ... advisors, you will often find those closest to you, your dearest friends, members of your own family, perhaps, loving, anxious, and knowing nothing whatever ...

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#16. You must not allow yourself to be advised, cautioned, influenced, persuaded

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#17. It is typical for implicit status hierarchies of influence and esteem to emerge in interpersonal encounters, especially those that are goal oriented.

Susan T. Fiske

#18. The world is not likely to tire of an amusement which never repeats itself, of a game which today presents features as novel and charms as fresh as those with which it delighted, in the morning of history, the dwellers on the banks of the Ganges and Indus.

Willard Fiske

#19. This is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#20. Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.

Edward Fiske

#21. Go into the streets, into the slums, into the fashionable quarters. Go into the day courts and the night courts. Become acquainted with sorrow, with many kinds of sorrow. Learn of the wonderful heroism of the poor, of the incredible generosity of the very poor

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#22. We now witness the constructive work on a foundation that will endure through the ages. That foundation is the god of science - revealed to us in terms that will harmonize with our intelligence.

John Fiske

#23. Ours is no bloody battle With woe and horror fraught Our joust is of a gentler kind A measuring of Mind with Mind A tournament of thought

Willard Fiske

#24. To attain, and to keep, a professional-managerial job requires class-specific human capital. Developing and displaying that capital is a central preoccupation of upper-middle class life.

Susan T. Fiske

#25. Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

John Fiske

#26. Above all, ignore the audience.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#27. We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.

John Fiske

#28. Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery?

John Fiske

#29. The persecuting spirit has its origin ... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

John Fiske

#30. The essence of acting is the conveyance of truth through the medium of the actor's mind and person. The science of acting deals with the perfecting of that medium.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#31. Idealistic producing is safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay and always will.

Minnie Maddern Fiske