| Professor Quotes |
Updated 28 June, in Trinity and BU sections.
TRINITY PROFS
New Quotes
"Nowadays, they leave parents and children together immediately after birth, instead of whisking the kid away and traumatising it in various ways." - McGrath, Psych 101
"Aspirin is bad, because it makes your stomach bleed. You bleed to death, by bleeding." - Wiseman, Abnormal Psych
"Groups of schizophrenics are really interesting." - Wiseman, Abnormal Psych
"In physics and chemistry, you only have a certain number of variables, and they don't talk back to you." - Flibbert, Intro to International Relations, discussing why the hard sciences are easier than the social sciences.
"You go to Wal-Mart and buy a huge amount of ding-dongs, because it's only a dollar a ding-dong, and this is why people get fat." - Flibbert, Intro to IR.
"Christianity is the most materialistic of religions. This has been mentioned by adherents and critics. To me, this means that Christianity takes this world seriously, deals with the stuff of it, rather than trying to explain it away." - The Rev. Dan Heischman, College chaplain, Easter Sunday sermon.
"Sovereignty is not bestowed by one country and restored at will." - Flibbert, Intro to IR.
"This is why we can't sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Because we kill them." - Flibbert, Intro to IR.
"As people get to know each other better, sometimes, they don't like each other." - Flibbert, on the downside of regional integration.
"You're what? Twenty-something? As cool as it may seem, becoming a cynic right now is not a good idea." - Flibbert
"When studying in a group, you should all be active, trying to dominate the group - this isn't speaking as a realist or anything like that." - Flibbert
"Well, I naturally agree with you -" "As you should!" - SStudent and Professor Wheatley, London: A Literary Life.
"It's sort of the same as saying, 'let's get in touch with your animus' - but that's not a great come-on line in Psychotherapy." - Professor Lee, Psychotherapy.
“It’s
important to mate when I tell you, and mate promiscuously.” – Bonneau,
Bio 152 (lab)
“Stop
reproducing, you little hussy.” - Bonneau
"Some of your exams are in Israel. My colleague accidentally packed them. Those of you whose exams are not in Israel will have them on Tuesday. Those of you whose exams are in Israel, be proud to be on the cutting edge of the new internationalism." - Chatfield, Vietnam (I was recruiting for my thesis in this class at the time, not taking it)
New Quotes from Classes I Didn't Take, Stolen Off The Jolt.
“I
know you kids are all trying to make it to Heaven, but you never will, you
Godless, fornicating youth.” -Prof. Gerry
Watts, American Studies Jr. Seminar
“I
should give a class called "Chocolate, Sex, Death and God.”
“No,
no. I don't drink before coming to class. I take drugs before coming to
class.” - Prof Peltier
“Want
to come back to my room and see my platonic solids?” - Wyshinski
“...so
then Heidegger seems to be the biggest fancy-pants of all. Uh, did I just use
the term 'fancy-pants'?”
“His
reasoning that the disciples couldn't possibly be drunk was that it was too
early in the morning. Wait 'till he gets to Trinity College.”
“Answer
the fucking question now, before I open up a can of whoop-ass on you.”
“Due
to God's continuing controversy with New England (in this case today's blizzard
warning) class will be cancelled.”
“In
my next life I think I'm going to be a woman. I have had enough of drinking beer
and swallowing goldfish.”
“Being
lined in front of a firing squad and saved at the last minute, in addition to
spending ten years in prison, fortunately made [Dostoyevsky] a much better
writer. It's what they call in
California ‘finding yourself’.” – Kassow, Historical Patterns in
European Development II
"You only worship Gods that deliver." - Kirkpatrick, on why he doesn't worship the Red Sox.
Old Quotes
“What
about creepy-crawly things? What
does [Leviticus] say about creepy-crawly things?” - Desmangles; Myth, Rite
& Sacrament
“I
should not curse in class. But I do
it anyway. Because I like it.” - Oler;
Drugs & Behavior
"Money is a secondary reinforcer used to gain access to a primary reinforcer called food. And sometimes sex, but that's another story." - Oler
“Anybody
write me an email, send any death threats to my mailbox?” - Oler
“I
think at the end of the semester, if you’re not totally into drugs and
behavior, you might want to return the book at the end of the semester, and have
money for beer and stuff.” - Oler
“If
you can’t see from where you’re sitting, either move to another seat or drop
the class.” – Oler
"If things that shouldn’t make you sad, like seeing a cute puppy, make you want to kill yourself, you might want to get yourself checked out.” - Oler
"It's
kind of a slutty drug. It binds to a lot of different receptors." - Oler
"I'm going to an amygdala conference this weekend - why does everybody laugh when I say that?" - Oler
“The
first person who proposed that the Adam and Eve story had to do with sex was
Saint Augustine, and he had a hang-up. Saint
Augustine was no saint - that is, before he became a saint.” - Desmangles
“A
dirty joke is very sacred.” - Desmangles
“A
liberal arts education was invented by people who were very wealthy and instead
of sitting around on golf courses, they decided to do something good for
themselves so they invented something very impractical and they called it
liberal arts.” - Desmangles
“Shamanism
is a little bit like the Jerry Springer
show. It’s like prostituting out a
religious experience.” – Desmangles
“Beer.
Yeah. That goes with
collecting snakes. It’s an old
tradition.”
“So
if you take a cross-section of the human penis … don’t try this at home”
“If you watch nature programmes on public television, you’ll see that the mother elephant kicks the baby out at about age two. We tried to do that with some of our kids, it didn’t go over too well.” - Winer, Psych 101
"The little boys - and the big boys, but let's just talk about the little boys - like to touch themselves, because it feels good." - Wiseman, Abnormal Psychology
"Professor, I can't take the exam. I have to have sex." - Wiseman
"My son is not evil." - Wiseman
"I had a few patients escape on me. We'd have to go run down these anorexic girls. They run really fast, actually." - Wiseman
"Did you see Silence of the Lambs? Yeah, they had him in restraints and a mask because ... he bit people." - Wiseman
"Demonic possession. Yeah, that's not in the DSM." - Wiseman
"Right here, the [stress level/quality of work] curve starts to go down again. This is when people are sitting in bunkers and flipping out." - Flibbert, Intro. to International Relations
"As a kid, I remember thinking, 'wow, we could all die in a big ball of flame.' And that's a big deal." - Flibbert
"Until 1995, Switzerland was in possession of 600 tons of uranium. Yeah, it wasn't just chocolates and cuckoo clocks they were working on there." - Flibbert
"About eighty percent of women reported having a homosexual experience - mostly in college, which was considered a time for experimentation. So if you're thinking of it, do it now, it'll be a lot harder later." - O'Donnell, Bio 152
"There's less than a calorie in a dollar bill." - McGrath, Psych 101
"Let's come back now, since we've degenerated into poor Jane Goodall having sex with gorillas." - Anselmi, Development and Culture
"If we came into the room, and there was a baby in the trash can ..." - Anselmi
"Usually when you hug a child, it'll hug you back, unless it doesn't know you very well, or you're - evil." - Wiseman
BOSTON UNIVERSITY PROFS
New Quotes
"Whenever I hear people talking about probability in terms of percentages, it means one of two things. They’re either advertising their stupidity, or they went to Boston College. (Pause) It’s the same thing." - Bianco, Statistics
"The technical term would be, this policy sucks." - Idson, Economics
"Colin Powell’s office requested 500 copies of [Clausewitz’s] On War [at the beginning of Gulf War I]. Our feeling was that if they hadn’t read it yet, now was not the time to start." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"If you’re creating a socialist paradise and people are running away from it, it’s embarrassing." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"This isn’t Star Trek. It takes some time to get to the other side of the Mediterranean." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
[On visiting Iceland]: "The first question I was always asked was, ‘Where’s Professor Corgan?’" - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"I used to threaten to assign a volume of Kim Il-Sung to anyone who couldn’t come up with an essay topic… They [the volumes] make great doorstops, by the way." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"I do like the idea of ‘who lost China?’ because it sounds like it was misplaced by the State Department." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
[I wrote in the margins of this one – ‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised!’ – CM]
"Basically, vice presidents of this period would go in in the morning to check if the president was still alive and, on learning that he was, get on with smoking the next cigar." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"Churchill took a case of scotch to Yalta to sterilise things in – possibly including himself." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"I had an absolutely brilliant lecture prepared for you – I assure you it was – and it’s trapped somewhere in the black hole of the computer world. It will reemerge at some point." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"The best tool of a politician is a good thesaurus." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"One of the really grim things about the Soviet Union was how long the speeches could last." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"If any of you don’t think of a topic for your essay, I will assign you a paper based on reading the minutes of the Nonintervention Committee." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"Stalin’s getting very lonely over in Eastern Europe, all alone with Hitler, who has written some interesting things about what he wants to do with him…" - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"People want to get involved in civil wars – or uninvolved, in an involved sort of way. I’ll explain that later." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"The UK and the US are the Bobsey Twins of international relations." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"The British codebreaking office used to go down to the pub on Friday evenings and break Wilson’s codes for recreation." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"I just came back from struggling with a dentist who I think used to interrogate people for the secret police." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"Wilson wasn’t happy about the decision because… he thought it was silly." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"’Shot while trying to escape’ is another one of those coded phrases." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"Academics are always willing to go anywhere for a captive audience and a free lunch." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"Foreign policies also come with neuroses. This is a little-known fact." - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
"Wouldn’t it be good if someone told the British army they were planning a war?" - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
Student: "How was France at this time?"
Goldstein: "Depressed. And engaging in a lot of displacement
activity by taking over large parts of the Sahara Desert and colouring them in
the correct colour in the French school atlases."
"You can negotiate, even if you study International Relations!" - Goldstein, Diplomacy and Statecraft
[On a photo of the French ambassador and Ho Chi Minh]: "I don’t know what they’re smoking there, but it didn’t work." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"A bipolar world. Now for you psych majors, that does not mean that the world is manic depressive…" - Keylor, History of International Relations
[On Brezhnev and Ford]: "Well, they’re not kissing each other the way that Nixon and Brezhnev did, but they’re wearing the same kind of hats…" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Optimism and the Middle East in the same sentence?" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Whenever you find gold and diamonds, the British are not going to be very far behind." - Keylor, History of International Relations
[Shortly after 9/11]: "One of my colleagues today asked me what I was lecturing on, and I said, ‘The Great War.’ And he said, ‘My God, has it started?’" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"[Bin Laden] apparently has friends in the Boston area, but I’m not one of them." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Generals always fight the last war." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Germany’s going to get a much better response if she becomes a democracy than if her soldiers show up in spiked helmets." - Keylor, History of International Rellations
"Austin Chamberlain: the British foreign secretary with the wonderful monocle!" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Putting it strongly and openly, as Churchill was prone to do after a couple of glasses of cognac…" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"The belief behind Prohibition was that you could solve all the problems of America by, uh… keeping people sober." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"You know we’re for you, that’s why our guns are aimed at you." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Forget: that’s what ‘amnesty’ means. Comes from the same root as ‘amnesia.’" - Keylor, History of International Relations
[The essence of diplomacy]: "You have to work with people you probably wouldn’t invite to dinner." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"And to our own native farmers, we say, ‘The hell with you!’" - Keylor, History of International Relations
[On his PowerPoint presentations]: "I’m getting better and better, and one of these days – Academy Award!" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"And the British like oil." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"And Churchill is going to sit down with a substantial bottle of cognac… and he’s going to draw the map of the Middle East." - Keylor, History of International Relations
Keylor’s T.A, Mike: "For the most part, we
[the U.S.] are evil."
Student in back: "But we’re less evil than we were!"
Keylor’s T.A., Mike: "If we’d known there was oil underneath the parts of Mexico we didn’t take, we wouldn’t have been so generous."
[On invading neutral countries]: "They were in the way." - Keylor, History of International Relations
[Summary of Roosevelt and Stalin’s discussion on German prisoners of war]: "’Let’s shoot them!’ ‘Yeah!’" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"How many of you took IR 349 with me last semester? (Many hands go up.) Omigod! I can’t tell the same jokes!" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Those of you who need to add this course, you must go over to the History Department and undergo a briefly unpleasant experience." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Let me begin with a very pretty picture, which I actually took myself…" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were two halves of the same… walnut." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Here, you could buy a car and a fallout shelter. And a swimming pool at the same place." - Keylor, History of International Relations
"But there’s Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek saying, uh, ‘I love you.’" - Keylor, History of International Relations
"Do not moon the nuclear weapon." - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"A gun cannot be all bad if it is pointed away from you." - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"What have I got? Oh, my pants!" - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"There are ways of killing leaders that make them martyrs, and there are ways of killing leaders that simply make them DEAD." - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"A machine is even stupider than a Harvard graduate." - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"All sorts of science is argued with baloney except for demographics." - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
Codevilla: "You’re talking about piping
the Silk Road. That’s a, a…"
Student: "Long-ass?"
Codevilla: "Yeah."
"You can call something a relationship, but you know exactly what’s going on, you know?" - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"There’s a bright side to corruption: All you have to do is buy these people!" - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"Winston Churchill pointed out to the Americans that they were smoking something intoxicating." - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"Being in the armed forces does not remove from you your normal affection for your own rear end." - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
"I, belonging to the Ghengis Khan faction of the Republican Party…" - Codevilla, Introduction to Security Studies
[On Sallust’s theory that only humans, of all the animals, can look up to the heavens and explore their universe]: "Which is of course wrong if you look at guinea pigs." - Grewing, Latin Prose
"Someone should write a murder mystery about the death of Virgil – where Horace is the murderer!" - Johnson, Latin Poetry
Old Quotes
"And then, all of a sudden, you have some unpleasant people with these things with which they look into space." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy, discussing the Enlightenment
"I hate that phrase!... what is it? ... 'to think outside the envelope.'" - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
From the back: "Box, Professor."
"We must accept a diktat... what an UnAmerican idea, I should be taken out of here in chains and shot..." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
On the impotent Louis XVI pretending to be a blacksmith: "The physical pounding and hot metal and so on, he found it very pleasant." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"Vienna, Paris -- bah! Who cares? Let's go back and plunder Persia." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"There were no... what is the expression? Bars holed?" - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"I never use the headphones. Somehow movies make more sense to me without the sound." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"Imagine a Rolls Royce that is pink with green stars on it and a big Jesus..." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"Here is a good reason for not believing history is driven by conspiracies - conspiracies never work! They're too complicated. People are too complex, too fickle, they talk too much." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"I try to maintain the illusion that I am an expert in International Relations." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"Starbucks is, like, EATING the world around us." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"I don't know if the wardrobe malfunction is on the same level as stem cell research." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"When I first came to America, I used to wear a black beret. I had to stop. Some people thought I was a fascist, others thought I was a Commie, and worst of all, some people thought I was French!" - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
"To die for nothing is considerably more painful than to die for one's country." - Lukes, Power and Legitimacy
LONDON PROFS
""You know, courtship - like when you get a bouquet of flowers, dinner for two ... or in my case, two pints of lager and a packet of crisps." - Macnicol, The British Welfare State
"I'll tell lots of lies if it gets you into grad. school." - Macnicol, Issues in British Education
"I knew someone with a nose like that. My first girlfriend, actually. She resembled a rabbit." - Macnicol
"You're going to fall in love with that magical place by the water. But it's not real." - Cousens, Britain and Europe