Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
“There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.”
"What Does It Mean?" in After 1903 — What? (1938)
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Robert Benchley29
American comedian 1889–1945Related quotes
Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician
Letter to William Wedgwood Benn, quoted in Birkenhead, Halifax (Hamish Hamilton, 1965), p. 275
Viceroy of India
David Benatar (1966) South African philosopher
Source: Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006), Introduction, p. 6
James Reston (1909–1995) Journalist, newspaper editor
New Leader (The New York Times (7 January 1963)
John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician
Source: Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor (1980), Chapter 2, “Axioms, Levels, and Iteration” (p. 27)
Camille Paglia (1947) American writer
The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age (2004)
Context: As a classroom teacher for over thirty years, I have become increasingly concerned about evidence of, if not cultural decline, then cultural dissipation since the 1960s, a decade that seemed to hold such heady promise of artistic and intellectual innovation. Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. Technology, like Kubrick's rogue computer, Hal, is the companionable servant turned ruthless master. The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today's students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions -- the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars -- but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. With out that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images.
“Things always seem impossible until people do them.”
Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar
2016, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)
John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician
Source: Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor (1980), Chapter 1, “Mathematics and Humor” (p. 10)
