Louis Menand Quotes
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I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.
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I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.
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Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.
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Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.
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Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is you want bright undergraduates to look at your profession as something they would be interested in getting into.
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It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.
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Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.
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Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.
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One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.
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Sometimes people won't even finish a piece that you wrote, because they've already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I'm going to end up with, but they don't finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.
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My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.
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It's generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest that professors are going to be more liberal than the general public.
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A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.
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Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.
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Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.
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If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.
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When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically.
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If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
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Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.
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The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.
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I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.
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I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.
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Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.
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I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.
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You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.
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One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
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It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.
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Most Americans who made it past the fourth grade have a pretty good idea who Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were. Not many Americans have even heard of Alice Paul, Howard W. Smith, and Martha Griffiths. But they played almost as big a role in the history of women’s rights as Marshall and King played in the history of civil rights for African-Americans. They gave women the handle to the door to economic opportunity, and nearly all the gains women have made in that sphere since the nineteen-sixties were made because of what they did.
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One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.
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The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.
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Related Authors
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Lionel Trilling Literary critic -
Scott Stossel Journalist -
John Dewey Philosopher -
Helen Vendler Poet -
Edmund Wilson Writer -
Louis Agassiz Geologist -
Stephen Greenblatt Literary critic -
Dwight Macdonald Writer -
William L. Shirer Journalist -
Paul de Man Philosopher -
Richard Rorty Philosopher -
Joan Acocella Journalist -
Lynne Truss Writer -
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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States -
William James Philosopher -
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Charles Sanders Peirce Philosopher -
Drew Gilpin Faust Historian -
Donald Barthelme Author