“Efficiency looks different in different places, but it has displaced truth everywhere.” (Carissa Byrne Hessick 2021)
“Waiting is a powerful way that marginalized populations are conditioned to understand their subordinate place”. (Robin Bartram 2022)
“Democracy [is] a continuous process of egalitarian inclusion and power sharing made possible by tireless agitators.” (Astra Taylor 2019)
“When people are able to rewrite the rules in a way that uses the old rules to create new rules that cannot be surmounted by normal political activity, you are no longer living in a constitutional democracy.” (Neil Buchanan 2023)
“It’s not that we always must agree; it’s that the process has to be respected.” (David Tabachnick 2023)
“When elected leaders betray their allegiance to the law and abandon their faith in the cleansing power of the truth, they must find no quarter in the Court.” (Joe Margulies 2022)
“How one competes with adversaries who don’t play by the rules without bending the rules yourself is a difficult question. But I am certain that rigorous accountability has to be part of it.”
(Craig Unger 2024)
“Informed, well-reasoned criticism from the inside should be encouraged, not brushed aside or punished. The dissent channel [at the U.S. Department of State] was set up with this lesson in mind, in the wake of the Vietnam War, to help avoid [] colossal mistakes. But the channel soon became a stigma… ‘If you use it, you will never be promoted again.’” (Fred Kaplan 2024)
“Equality and dignity — not the selective use of history and tradition — should be the core of substantive due process.” (Madiba K. Dennie 2024)
“Where you stand depends on where you sit.” (Rufus Miles [1949] 1978)
“The most basic principles of a strong democracy are accountability and respect for the Constitution and rule of law. You either have it, or you don’t.” (Brad Raffensperger [Georgia Secretary of State] 2023)
“The least popular person in this country has the same rights under this document as the most popular person.” (Stephen Breyer 2023)
“As John Stuart Mill noted in On Liberty in 1859, calls for civility are often a tool to enforce conformity. A fierce and angry defense of the values of the dominant class might be hailed as righteous rage, but even a milder, dissenting opinion is easily labeled uncivil.” (Greg Lukianoff 2014)
“Being civil then is a polite-sounding call to fall back in line with the normalized immiseration induced by the wealthy few. That ensures that professors self-censor or moderate their speech, teaching and writing about unequal power… Allowing university leaders and others to define the terms of what constitutes civility ignores their hypocrisy. They can engage in hate discourse and even promote epistemic violence by reframing their position as ‘being honest,’ while stymieing any and all contestation of their position as hysterical, violent or uncivil. This is why professors should not play the civility game. At a time when academic freedom and freedom of speech are under constant attack, we should all be weary and concerned about so-called calls for civility and recognize them for what they are: attempts to silence the messenger.” (David Embrick and Johnny Williams 2018)
“For Republicans (and Fox News), truth no longer has anything to do with facts, or even reality. Truth has returned to its pre-enlightenment meaning; or, as Merriam-Webster puts it, its archaic meaning: “fidelity, constancy.” To be true, in the medieval Trumpian world, is to be loyal and steadfast. It’s no longer about reason or even belief: It’s about faith. Freud had a word for this kind of primitive faith; he called it illusion.” (Steven Reisner 2024)
“While one side doesn’t feel any compunction about ignoring the law, the other is hesitant to upend a nonbinding institutional norm. Lawlessness appears to be an agreed-upon outcome, a literal get-out-of-jail-free card, for whichever entity evinces the most contempt for the law.” (Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern 2024)
“Scarcity produced by natural fluctuation is not what troubles me. It is manufactured scarcity that I cannot accept.” (Robin Wall Kimmerer 2024)
“I have a great deal of sympathy for people who make arguments to challenge a consensus view. The line between consensus (a valuable meeting of minds) and conventional wisdom (closed-minded groupthink) can be blurry, and in any event, one of the things that academics most assuredly should feel free to do is to make unsettling arguments. But they have to be good arguments.” (Neil Buchanan 2020)
“[M]y experience of theory has mostly been one of valuing ideas, and in particular valuing the ability to identify connections and resonances and distinguishing gaps and contradictions between models and proposals. I do not like theory when it is used as a weapon. I especially dislike theory when it is used like a silencer on a gun. I prefer to see and use theory as a frame, a magnifying glass, a key, a plow, a sail, an oar. Theory…can get you where you want to go, faster.” (Teresia Teaiwa 2014)
“A work on [evolutionary theory], placed into our hands, is apt to be experienced as a bullet – either to be dodged, or loaded and fired at unbelievers. Skim the conclusions and decide which. One is, of course, thereby safe and sound when confronted by an enemy’s projectile; and pluralism produces a surfeit of enemies. But the price of safety is impotence. [Evolutionary] thought is most likely to influence others when it forces its proponent to accept conclusions found personally distasteful. By limiting my autonomy, binding myself to conclusions I dislike, I am less dangerous to others – and, perhaps, more likely to find common ground with these others elsewhere.” (Greg Pollock 2001)
“I would like to see sex kept not only for our recreation but also, for a long while, let it retain its old freedom and danger, still used for its old purposes.” (Bill Hamilton 1988)
“Feminist author Lynn Segal has written that in sex, if we are lucky, ‘the great dichotomies slide away’ – the dichotomies of male and female, of giver and receiver, of active and passive, of self and other.” (Katherine Angel 2021)
“Darwin admonished us not to ignore the ‘oddities and peculiarities’ of life as we see it today. It is by the analysis of such oddities that evolutionary history can be reconstructed.” (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan 1988)
““What are facts? Are they incontrovertible data that simply demonstrates what is true? Or are they bits of evidence marshalled to persuade others of the theory one sets out with? Do facts somehow exist in the world like pebbles, waiting to be picked up? Or are they manufactured and thus informed by all the social and personal factors that go into every act of human creation? Are facts beyond interpretation? Or are they the very stuff of interpretation, its symptomatic incarnation instead of the place where it begins?” (Mary Poovey 1998)
“Writing is hard work. It is boring and lonely. And there are too many long stretches of panic and self-hatred between the moments of inspiration. I have never been able to endure this drudgery and finish a piece that I did not care about passionately.” (Pat Califia 1988)
“Creativity requires openness and following intuition, looking at symbols and considering many perspectives, and listening and researching what other people have to say.… A second aspect of the creative process involves thinking in metaphors, that is, in symbols and images.” (Greg Cajete 2000)
“Not long ago, I quit social media.… I realize that in today’s world, this marks me as an outsider. It’s just that for me, an introvert more at ease with animals and books than people and machines, social media was a dystopian nightmare.” (Joe Margulies 2022)
“[Conservative strategists] redefined equality in a way that justified radically disparate outcomes. According to this logic, equality is why affirmative action is discriminatory and progressive taxation is repressive (both violate the principle of equal treatment) and why voter identification laws are fair (it doesn’t matter If marginalized communities are disproportionately prevented from voting because, technically, the rule applies to everyone…. If advancing equality via affirmative action or progressive taxation is portrayed as an unjust curtailment of liberty, it follows that ‘color-blind’ policies or a flat tax that treats everyone the same, regardless of their background, qualify as equity – maintaining, in other words, equality before the law while ignoring opportunity or outcome. That is how equality has been twisted to mean leaving vast imbalances of power firmly in place, lest the freedom of the unfathomably wealthy or racially privileged be impinged.” (Astra Taylor 2019)
“Active and fractious disagreement is a sign of health in a traditional system: it means that people are engaging their leaders and challenging them to prove the righteousness of their position. It means they are making them accountable…. In any culture deeply respectful of rationale thought, the only real political power consists of the ability to persuade.” (Taiaiake Alfred 1999)
“Science progresses most rapidly by the publication of bold hypotheses that all can examine with the greatest critical acumen. A bold hypothesis refuted by later research is not a failure but an advance in knowledge.” (Will Provine 1986; describing William Castle’s scientific philosophy)
“The goal of Catholics [and scientists?] is to change every hypothesis into a thesis. The thesis is good; the hypothesis is evil.” (Leslie C. Griffin 2021)
“Our culture has developed an unchecked obsession with ‘data,’ a commodity or resource it equates with knowing. We have arranged things, in fact, so that the world produces data almost on demand, like cows produce milk. No problem, it seems, can be acknowledged, let alone meaningfully addressed, before the geeks have converted it into data. But of course, data, like conspiracy thinking, creates only the illusion of control.” (Sebastian Smee 2025)
“If the future doesn’t look like the past, being data-driven actually is not really helping you that much.” (Ryan Petersen 2022)
“Data clouds the issue.” (Root Gorelick 2000)
“Knowledge is not simply information. Information amounts to little more than a collection of facts; knowledge is the result of the ability to learn and perceive. For information to become knowledge, one must do something with it.” (Rauna Kuokkanen 2007)
“Confusionists and superficial intellectuals move ahead while the ‘deep’ thinkers descend into the darker regions of the status quo.” (Paul Feyerabend 1975)
“Boundaries of science are drawn and redrawn. Borders are contentious, and as any scientist knows, science is not a revealed and unambiguous truth – today’s science may be tomorrow’s pseudoscience or vice versa.” (Laura Nader 1996)
“One way to know who among us can wield power is to pay attention to who makes the worst arguments. No, it is not that good arguments allow people to gain power. That would make sense. The perverse reality is that making obviously – even painfully – bad arguments is almost invariably a sign of laziness, and that laziness in turn derives from the fact that people with power (and their allies) know that they truly have no reason to bother coming up with honest and compelling arguments.” (Neil Buchanan 2025)
“Those in power will always set themselves up to stay in power; they will write the questions so that the answers are the ones they know. They’ll call knowledge that isn’t made for them ‘unscientific’ or ‘occult’.” (Jess Zimmerman 2021)
“The spirit of speculation is the same as the spirit of science…[t]he only difference between them is in the subsequent process of verifying hypotheses.” (George Romanes 1892)
“Without this freedom of inquiry and speech, the duties of your professors would be irksome and humiliating; they would be dishonored in their own eyes and in the estimation of the public.” (William Lawrence 1819)
“Go to the world to enjoy, because by enjoying you will learn, and by learning you will grow and by growing you will fulfill the sacred purpose of evolution.” (Quecha tradition, re-told by Frank Bracho 2006)
“What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it’s charming.” (Edgar Degas 1892)
“I’m opposed to expertise. For some reason, when I feel I am becoming an expert, I sabotage the whole thing…. The problem is, it’s as if you’re either going to be an expert or a dilettante, and I don’t want to be either.” (Ian ‘Sandy’ Frazier 2004)
“I smile when I hear my colleagues say ‘I discovered X.’ That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.” (Robin Wall Kimmerer 2013)
“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” (Jorge Luis Borges 1942)
“Interesting work requires a kind of idiocy, a kind of stupidity”. (Simon Critchley 2024)
“Blackness can be understood in two ways: (1) as a description of stereotypes, or (2) claiming their identity in a diaspora as a form of resistance.” (Nadeea Rahim 2021)
“Speculation is never a waste of time. It clears away the deadwood in the thickets of deduction.” (Elizabeth Peters 2000)
“Etymologically, [anarchy] just means a kind of order without hierarchy.” (James C. Scott 2020)
“[W]henever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking.”
(Septima Poinsette Clark; as quoted by Cynthia Stokes Brown 1986)
Root Gorelick 