Carl Becker quotes

" All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any. " # Science and Scientists

" Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept. " # Books - Reading # Writers and Writing # Ideas

" No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law? " # Lies and Lying

" "One of the first duties of man is not to be duped." " # Fear

" "No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?" " # Lies and Lying

" “A professor, as the German saying has it, is a man who thinks otherwise. Now an able and otherwise-thinking president [or Dean of Faculty], surrounded by able and otherwise-thinking professors, each resolutely thinking otherwise in his own manner, each astounded to find that the others, excellent fellows as he knows them in the main to be, so often refuse in matters of the highest import to be informed by knowledge or guided by reason [you’ve seen this happen]æthis is indeed always an arresting spectacle and may indeed sometimes seem to be a futile performance. Yet it is not futile unless great universities are futile.” " # Age and Aging