When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother.

To believe in a just law of cause and effect, carrying with it a punishment or a reward, is to believe in righteousness.

Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly 3 percent. The effect is highly significant.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.

Planets are too dim to be detected with existing equipment, far away, except in these very special circumstances where they're seen by their gravitational effect.

Well, in pharmacology, if the effect is local, it's of course absolutely awkward to use it in any other way than as a local treatment.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

The good news was that Enterprise and the newly arrived Yorktown had attacked the Marshall and Gilbert islands. Those attacks had a great effect on morale.

Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.

The Tax Code today is more complicated than ever, and the very people on the Republican side who denounce the Tax Code's complexity are the ones that put together what they now call a convoluted monstrosity. They put it into effect.

If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.

It would be great to take one city street and turn it into a pedestrian corridor and see what kind of effect it has on the businesses in that area - It's the future I think.

To enlarge or illustrate this power and effect of love is to set a candle in the sun.

The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all.

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.

The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation.

It becomes a giant's task to compute the result when the effect of cross seas, wind at all angles and ever varying force, arched surfaces, head resistance, ratio of weight to area, and the intelligence of the guiding power crop up.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

The question at the end of the day was, the courts having found there was no defense, a producer about to go to jail, should CBS in effect tell the producer go to jail even though there is no law at all that we can use to get you out of jail?

All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.

Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.

If you do things with a certain type of result and cause a certain type of reaction or effect, then you increase your market value. It's very much a competition for the entertainment dollar, and that's never been more clearly evident than in today's NBA game.

The automobile, both a cause and an effect of this decentralization, is ideally suited for our vast landscape and our generally confused and contrary commuting patterns.

As the cost of gasoline rises and our dependence on foreign oil continues to increase, the effect of sending over $100 billion each year to OPEC nations hurts every American.

This submission is a restraint of liberty, but could be of no effect as to the good intended, unless it were general; nor general, unless it were natural.