Louis Menand

“For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis…

— Louis Menand

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what…

— Louis Menand

Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor…

— Louis Menand

“In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the…

— Louis Menand

One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature…

— Louis Menand

You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.

— Louis Menand

“We do not (on Holmes’s reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual…

— Louis Menand

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

— Louis Menand

“[According to Holmes], ‘Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.…

— Louis Menand

It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their…

— Louis Menand

Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and…

— Louis Menand

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know…

— Louis Menand

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

— Louis Menand

“What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as…

— Louis Menand

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper…

— Louis Menand

I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic…

— Louis Menand

“If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to…

— Louis Menand

“No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.”

— Louis Menand

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.

— Louis Menand

It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should…

— Louis Menand

“Order what you feel like eating," says your impatient dinner companion. But the problem is that you don't KNOW what you feel…

— Louis Menand

“Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose…

— Louis Menand

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more…

— Louis Menand

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests…

— Louis Menand

I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political…

— Louis Menand