Louis Menand Quotes
We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.
If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.
Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.
Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.
You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.
I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.
The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.
Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.
I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.
Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.
My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.
I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.
It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.
You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.
I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.
Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.
Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.
Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.
I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.
One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.
One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
