Dick Armey Quotes

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.

A University with sectarian professorships becomes, of course, a sectarian monopoly: with professorships of rival sects, it would be an arena of Theological Gladiators. Without any such professorships, it may incur, for a time at least, the imputation of irreligious tendencies, if not designs. The last difficulty was thought more manageable than either of the others….there seems to be no alternative but between a public University without a theological professorship, and sectarian seminaries without a University

Too often what are called ‘educated’ people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents into their golden retirement years.

I want to spend my time at colleges and universities.

The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.

The Russians were doing a lot of rotten things, you can point to them. But the idea that if you consider what Hans Morgenthau called "I called abuse of reality," the picture of the world was almost the opposite of what they presented. But somehow this sells and is continually repeated, at least in this kind of situation.

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.

Truth" is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

Nature introduces children to the idea—to the knowing—that they are not alone in this world, and that realities and dimensions exist alongside their own.

Fantasy and reality often overlap.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

I've got a penny-ante talent, out of which I try to drum up a living for myself. And what nobody seems to realize is that it's just as difficult to get a bad idea as a good one.

The core tenant of what I teach is there are no facts inside the building. When we come up with a new idea, we tend to slide into our own reality distortion field to convince ourselves and others. And that's not healthy.

What is appealing is the idea of attaining the unattainable and learning from it. Once you obtain a fantasy it becomes a reality, and that reality is not as exciting as your fantasy. Through the fantasies you learn to appreciate your own realities.

The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists.

To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

There is the mind itself. It is like a smooth lake which when struck, say by a stone, vibrates. The vibrations gather together and react on the stone, and all through the lake they will spread and be felt. The mind is like the lake; it is constantly being set in vibrations, which leave an impression on the mind; and the idea of the Ego, or personal self, the "I", is the result of these impressions. This "I" therefore is only the very rapid transmission of force and is in itself no reality.

The 21st Century should be India's century but from 2004 to 2014 bad ideas and bad actions have affected the country adversely. Every day was a new bad day and there were new scandals. People were furious.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

An idea doesn't die," said Trapp. "It exists somewhere, in its own dimension, waiting to be perceived.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea. And few ideas are worse than the ones we have about art.