Quote of the Day posts

Thursday July 31, 2014

Quote of the Day

“Stay gangster, Joe! I dig you, man.”

-- Unnamed student after Vice-President Joe Biden delivered the commencement address at the University of Delaware, May 2014, as reported in Evan Osnos' excellent New Yorker profile, “The Evolution of Joe Biden.” According to Osnos, after the shout, “Biden looked up, pleased but perplexed ... He waved and kept walking.” But I agree. I dig him, man.

Joe Biden

Wednesday July 30, 2014

Quote of the Day

“William Bendix, who played the Babe in 'The Babe Ruth Story' is my personal favorite [actor who played Babe Ruth], for nostalgic reasons. I first saw the movie with my dad, who was a sucker for this kind of schmaltz. And it’s a fun movie to watch, with just the slightest hint of authenticity—Bendix was a Yankees batboy during Ruth’s prime years in the 1920s. In the movie, his over-the-top, obstinate pointing to outer space (as opposed to center field) before hitting the famous 1932 'called shot' home run against the Cubs in the World Series is hilarious. The pitch Bendix hits comes down like a slow-pitch softball floater, and his uppercut would have made Mike Tyson proud.”

-- Jerry Grillo, “Babe as Babe: Nobody does it better,” as he sorts through the various actors who played Babe Ruth and goes with an inspired choice.

Babe Ruth and William Bendix

Here, Babe Ruth shows William Bendix how to swing ... or gets ready to kneecap him.

Posted at 11:56 AM on Jul 30, 2014 in category Quote of the Day
Tags: Jerry Grillo, Babe Ruth
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Tuesday July 29, 2014

Quote of the Day

“We are only allowed to live one life: it’s the human condition, there’s no escaping it. In my view, only by studying the humanities can we hope to escape this fundamental limitation and understand how other people live. Because literature, history, or philosophy all provide extraordinary windows on the world. Foreign languages, too, are fundamental.

”The French language gave me an entrée into another culture. It allowed me to discover different means of expression, a different way of life, different values, a different system of thought. Because when you’re a judge and you spend your whole day in front of a computer screen, it’s important to be able to imagine what other people’s lives might be like, lives that your decisions will affect. People who are not only different from you, but also very different from each other. So, yes, reading is a very good thing for a judge to do. Reading makes a judge capable of projecting himself into the lives of others, lives that have nothing in common with his own, even lives in completely different eras or cultures. And this empathy, this ability to envision the practical consequences on one’s contemporaries of a law or a legal decision, seems to me to a crucial quality in a judge.“

-- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, ”On Reading Proust," interviewed in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 2013. The interview was originally conducted in French and published in La Revue des Deux Mondes in Paris as part of a special issue entitled “Proust vu d’Amérique.”

Posted at 12:44 PM on Jul 29, 2014 in category Quote of the Day
Tags: Stephen Breyer, US Supreme Court, Literature
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Monday July 28, 2014

Quote of the Day

“Our teachers’ best qualities—their sense of humor, their love for the subject, their excitement, their interest in students as individuals—are not being honored or valued, because those qualities aren’t measurable.”

-- Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which represents 84,000 teachers, in Rachel Aviv's devastating New Yorker article on the perils of applying corporate philosophy to education: “Wrong Answer: In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school makes a shocking choice.” It's not just our school systems, of course; most jobs are increasingly data-driven. So much is about the quantity and rarely about the quality. We now live in an era in which people are judged by numbers while corporations are judged as people. See Bunk for an appropriate response to all of this.

Posted at 12:28 PM on Jul 28, 2014 in category Quote of the Day
Tags: Schools, Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker
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Friday July 25, 2014

Quote of the Day

Andrew Sullivan again. He riffs off of Tom Ricks' post, “Why Am I Moving Left?” by listing off some of the reasons he himself is not embracing the Bush/Cheney/Gingrich/Cruz/Ryan GOP, including its defense of torture, its ideological blindness, various issues regarding racism, sexism, and homophobia, and its political brinkmanship:

In fact, from that first stimulus vote on, Obama faced a unanimous and relentless nullification Congress. If he favored something, they opposed it. Despite Obama’s exemplary family life, public grace and composure, and willingness to compromise, they decided to cast him as a tyrant, a radical, a traitor and an incompetent. Their demonization of a decent, pragmatic man simply disgusts me to the core.

Amen. And I'm sorry so many Americans are too stupid to see this.

Barack Obama