Reflections

Some pearls of wisdom gleaned during my college career:

From Professors:

Psychology:
"What kind of associations do we have with grass? It's clean, it's fun, people frolic in it!"

"They bring us closer to the Lord, pop quizzes do."

"Math is someone you don't want to meet in a dark alley. Because let's face it: "math" is a four-letter word."

"Who doesn't miss the afternoon nap, or snack time? These were good things, wasted on the young."

English/Philosophy:
“If your life is not making sense, stick your thumb in your eye. Pain has a way of focusing our attention.”

“You know things are bad when they start writing country-western songs about you.”

“What do you call a sea captain who can sail anywhere in the world and robs people? That’s a pirate. He’s got a patch over one eye and he says ‘Arrr.’”

“English women in the good old days were like Xena, warrior princess.”

“I’m very suspicious of people who want to do away with Christmas.”

“Some things give me the heebie-jeebies: cell phones have been a plague on society.”

“You can blame Aristotle for everything.”

“To believe in an empty tomb does not require you to have an empty mind.”

“We’re just flopping along…flopping? Flipping? Are we flopping along? What are we doing?”

“Job [the book of the Bible] is not about suffering: it’s about the sovereignty of God. God has the right to do whatever He wants.”

"My car could be wet for other reasons. There could be an army of demented teenagers with Supersoakers out there."

History:
“I don’t give grades; I just discover them.”

Textbooks:
Miscellaneous:
“The next reason that you might think you do not understand what I’m telling you is, while I’m describing to you how Nature works, you won’t understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.”
--Richard Feynman

Critical Thinking: Consider the Verdict
On truth tables:
“Now that’s the sort of fun you can have for hours, without gaining weight, spending money, or risking infection.”

“You cannot judge an argument by its source. If we should discover that an argument long attributed to Socrates was in fact given by Socrates’ favorite sandal maker, then that would be important for scholars studying ancient Greek philosophy, but it would have no bearing on the strength of the argument.”

“Unfortunately, many people—particularly politicians and advertisers—lean on statistics the way a drunk leans on a street lamp: for support, rather than illumination.”

An Introduction to Language:
“Pragmatics also tells us about language use. It tells us that calling someone a son of a bitch is not a zoological opinion, it’s an insult. It tells us that when a beggar on the street asks do you have any spare change? it is not a fiduciary inquiry, it’s a request for money.”

Nonclassical Physics: Beyond Newton's Views
“At present, it is believed that quarks are the fundamental fermions that engage in the strong force. Six different types are known, and they have been given the names up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. (No meaning should be attached to these names. In the early days of elementary particle physics, frivolity reigned, and particles and properties were often given fanciful names.)”

>Literary Theory: An Introduction:
on the "structuralist" view of readers:
“An ideal reader would need to be fully equipped with all the technical knowledge essential for deciphering the work, to be faultless in applying this knowledge, and free of any hampering restrictions. If this model was pressed to an extreme, he or she would have to be stateless, classless, ungendered, free of ethnic characteristics and without limiting cultural assumptions. It is true that one does not tend to meet many readers who fill this bill entirely satisfactorily, but the structuralists conceded that the ideal reader need not do anything so humdrum as actually exist.”