#harvard

If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause. ↗

— Charles Morgan

#commandments #exceptions #gone #had #harvard

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco. ↗

— Douglass North

#been #came #coast #college #company

Obama has built his public image around his ability to bridge divisions - racial, ideological or generational. And that was his reputation, even at Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the 'Law Review.' ↗

— Mara Liasson

#around #black #bridge #built #divisions

A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic. ↗

— Beatrice Wood

#except #harvard #his #mind #poet

Then I had another one of my well-researched epiphanies. His constant use of Purell, his love of video games, his lack of friends, planet gazing, and flail-run. “You’re a zombie,” I gasped. “No. I’m not,” he said. I went back to the vampire theory. ↗

— Harvard Lampoon

#nightlight #parody #twilight #vampires #zombies

I knew my dad would insist on carrying my twelve bags into the house all by himself, so I ran ahead to my room. It looked familiar. Four walls and a ceiling, just like my old room in Phoenix! Leave it to my dad to find little ways to make me feel at home. ↗

— Harvard Lampoon

#nightlight #parody #twilight #home

Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples’ places. Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such a power to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages. They can close their hearts and minds to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think that they have any fewer nightmares than I do. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#jk-rowling #experience

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#harvard-commencement-speech #life

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient. ↗

— William James

#proof #religion #science #spirituality #theory

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic. ↗

— Roy Blount, Jr.

#clinic #harvard #learning #like #literature