Quotes About The Humanities

#1. It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry.

Damon Horowitz

#2. History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

Gordon S. Wood

#3. If the humanities were science, the vocabularies of the world's languages would add up, not overlap.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#4. Would the humanities care to colonize the sciences?

Edward O. Wilson

#5. His office was on the third floor of the Humanities & Social Sciences Building, just down the hall from the interview room. On the office door was a Peanuts cartoon of Lucy in the psychiatrist's booth with the little DOCTOR is IN sign. Professor Mitchell, a man on the cutting edge of humor.

Rick Riordan

#6. How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed; that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity.

Sonny Rollins

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. I think most of us sense that it is a responsibility of the humanities to try to help better the conduct of human beings in their lives and manifold professional activities.

J. Irwin Miller

#10. [T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.

Camille Paglia

#11. I am suggesting that you take as many opportunities as possible in college to step away from whatever specialized program of study you have decided to pursue and have the kind of experience that the humanities can give you.

William Deresiewicz

#12. I'm big into social studies, the humanities. I really love history and world issues and philosophy and law.

Connor Jessup

#13. The 'deep' civic function of the humanities ... is something understood very well by totalitarian societies, which tend to keep close tabs on them, and to circumscribe them in direct proportion to how stringently the population is controlled.

Mark Slouka

#14. The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.

J. Irwin Miller

#15. So what could the hypothetical aliens learn from us that has any value to them? The correct answer is the humanities.

Edward O. Wilson

#16. I think the humanities always have to take science, our great knowledge that we get from science, into account, but then try to answer the human questions and try to make sense out of our lives, taking into account all of the scientific knowledge.

Rebecca Goldstein

#17. Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons.

Stephen Greenblatt

#18. The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience.

Eric Kandel

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

Clifford Geertz

#20. The position of an art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities.

Ayn Rand

#21. No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
(The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

David McCullough

#22. [..] a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don't serve the god of capital: the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, pervers work and gets paid - even paid well - for it.

Maggie Nelson

#23. I have a long-term interest in the humanities.

Jim Leach

#24. Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions.

Siri Hustvedt

#25. The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult.

Philip Warren Anderson

#26. I suppose the situation varies from field to field. If you're a mathematician, your proficiency in English may not be such a problem. If you're in the humanities or social sciences, there is no doubt that it is a handicap for you.

Henry Rosovsky

#27. The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.

Ruth Benedict

#28. Lisa had an engineer's way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.

Austin Grossman

#29. The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities.

Joseph Stiglitz

#30. The sciences are the 'how,' and the humanities are the 'why' - why are we here, why do we believe in the things we believe in. I don't think you can have the 'how' without the 'why.'

George Lucas

#31. Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.

Amity Shlaes

#32. Tacit knowledge is one of the most important concepts of current scholarship in the humanities. Ambitious and important, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is a well-written and original book.

Robert P. Crease

#33. 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

#34. The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures ... They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.

Allan Bloom

#35. America is very decentralized in how it supports the humanities, unlike European countries where virtually everything stems from the central government.

Jim Leach

#36. Today and always, there will be an obligation to pass on to the new generation the tradition of liberal scholarship - scientific or in the humanities - and to bring the understanding of things and human actions to everyone.

Frank Macfarlane Burnet

#37. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.

Harry Reid

#38. What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#39. It was a community of scholars just outside of adolescence, a sort of Marvel comic where every hero represented a different arm of the humanities.

Maggie Stiefvater

#40. I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.

David McCullough

#41. The humanities don't belong to some elitist group ... knowledge as a whole should be embraced.

Ruth Simmons

#42. 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

#43. Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them - and us.

Nicholas Kristof

#44. Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the 'man in white' dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology.

Christian De Duve

#45. The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

John Updike

#46. Colleges don't teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another.

Bernard Baruch

#47. If the intuition-mongering were abandoned, would that be the end of philosophy? It would be the end of a certain style of philosophy - a style that has cut philosophy off, not only from the humanities but from every other branch of inquiry and culture.

Philip Kitcher

#48. Though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.

Amelia Barr

#49. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

Harold Bloom

#50. To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.

Howard Mumford Jones

#51. If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.

Edward O. Wilson

#52. It is in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough - it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

Steve Jobs

#53. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

Terry Eagleton

#54. Praise the humanities, my boy. That'll make them think you're broadminded!

Winston Churchill

#55. I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.

Tom Stoppard

#56. The humanities and science are not in inherent conflict but have become separated in the twentieth century. Now their essential unity must be re-emphasized, so that twentieth-century multiplicity may become twentieth-century unity.

Lewis Mumford

#57. The method of science is logical and rational; the method of the humanities is one of imagination, sympathetic understanding, 'indwelling.

Andrew Louth

#58. The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'.

Stephen D. Cox

#59. The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

Irving Babbitt

#60. In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

Terry Eagleton

#61. But science is the collection of nature's answers; the humanities the collection of men's thoughts.

Gavin De Beer

#62. 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

#63. Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

Alfred L. Kroeber

#64. The neglect of the humanities in present-day education is doubtless not a cause but a symptom of an age.

Vincent Massey

#65. [I]n the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on ... people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.

Noam Chomsky

#66. Let's also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.

Edward O. Wilson

#67. . . the humanities encourage the development of our own humanity. They are our instruments of self-exploration.

Michael Dirda

#68. There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Camille Paglia

#69. The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#70. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.

Mohsin Hamid

#71. Likewise, Humanities Computing is the creative result of failure on the part of the manufacturers of early computers to produce operational machines in time to be used during the Second World War (or, one can argue, of failure on the part of the allied forces to make the war last longer).

Melissa Terras

#72. 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.

Steven Pinker

#73. Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.

Richard Dawkins

#74. 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

#75. She wasn't some little princess from the suburbs who just graduated college with a humanities degree, she knew what people were really like.

David Wong

#76. A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

Camille Paglia

#77. Today is built on tragedies, which no one wants to face, nightmares to humanities and morally disgraced. Tonight is filled with rage, violence in the air, children bred with ruthlessness because no one at home cares.

Tupac Shakur

#78. Merlin seeks assistance from Pigwiggen, the only one of Arthur's knights who is also a fairy, and they unite their enchantments to move the British Court to Turkestan. Lively end to Act One.

Davies Robertson

#79. The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we're a part.

Ronald Reagan

#80. In South Carolina, there's a lot of arts programs. So I was blessed enough to go to the Governor School For Arts & Humanities.

Danielle Brooks

#81. The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.

Bill Ayers

#82. 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

#83. Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

Lisa Randall

#84. The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things ...

Richard P. Feynman

#85. 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

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

Ken Robinson

#87. Humanities education is the worst thing for an industrialist.

Andrew Carnegie

#88. It's an artist's right to rebel against the world's stupidity.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#89. America has not always been kind to its artists and scholars. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#90. I've always written. I'm from an older generation of programmers [who] did not come out of engineering. [A]ll sorts of people were drawn in from the social sciences and humanities.

Ellen Ullman

#91. My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn't cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford.

Nick Denton

#92. Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.

John Berger

#93. Ah, the magic of music, with it, all things are possible.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#94. An artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#95. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

Mohsin Hamid

#96. blessed are the storytellers, because they can bridge oceans, marshal great forces, inspire and instruct, transcend all limits, transform hearts and minds. They can break down barriers and be the common thread for disparate humanities, reaching across distant borders.

Ron Perlman

#97. Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career.

E.A. Bucchianeri

#98. Grace, you have never and will never quietly exist. You shine on earth as if the sun was born here. You have been a beacon for all of humanities sufferings and exhilarations.

Christine Zolendz

#99. Higher educating is defaulting on its obligations to offer young people a quality and broad-based education. This is true in part because the liberal arts and humanities have fallen out of favor in a culture that equates education with training.

Henry Giroux

#100. Our culture is more shaped by the arts and humanities than it often is by politics.

Jim Leach