Felix Rohatyn Quotes

Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

I had inherited what my father called the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.

Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.

I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

I'm instinctively cautious because I'm an academic.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

Wisely used history can give pleasure and provide us with a useful tool; but we should not become its slaves.

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations - Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them - even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding - such is the role of a scientist.

I do regret that when I went to college, I didn't have a liberal arts education. I got a BFA in musical theater, so it was a very directed toward what I was doing. I wish that I had expanded my horizons a little bit.

Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.

I think what's always important is not to be contrarian for its own sake but to really get at the truth.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.

It is important that students bring a certain …, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

One of the first things we should teach every student is not to believe everything they read and hear.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

I think a liberal arts education isn't necessarily about doing something with your degree; it's about becoming a critical thinker. And I think that critical thinking is so integral to being an actor.

I studied psychology, history, and religion. I was a heady girl, but frankly, I'm glad I studied those subjects because a lot of that has really helped me as an actress.

I deplore the tendency, in some institutions, to go directly toward training for a trade or profession or something and ignoring the liberal arts. It is the foundation of education.

A cheap and easy cynicism rails at everything. The master of the art accomplishes the formidable task of discrimination.

The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.

I don't believe anything unless I understand it inside out. And even if I understand something, it is not uncommon that I disagree with accepted view (even if it's a Nobel laureate).