Creative people do not belong in the university because the process is antithetical to the analytical process so necessary for proper scholarship.
I think he's informing himself, reaching out and getting ideas and information and advice. I haven't the slightest doubt that internally taking shape in that marvelous brain of his is a philosophy of foreign affairs. But it would be premature to say that one is fully formed.
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog: Nobody really enjoys it, and the frog generally dies as a result.
You cannot build public policies on sentiment, on panic and fear.
The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it.
Forensics is eloquence and reduction.
At all times it is better to have a method.
Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
I'm not sure people would think of me in this light, but frankly, what I enjoyed most about Bain & Company, the consulting firm, was the analytical process of solving tough problems.
It's very difficult to solve a lot of problems from the top down.
We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box.
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.
It's really important when we're writing our opinions to be transparent about what our decision method in the case is and how we get from Point A to B to C in the analysis.
I despise research. I think it's a crutch.
Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.
The formula is the star. I couldn't work inside that formula.
We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.
Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.
When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached.
My approach has never been to start from theories to arrive at facts, but on the contrary, to try to bring out from the facts the explanatory thread without which they appear incomprehensible and elude effective action.
So if I could just go back now to something which I am sure we should cover here regarding our original scenario: we have, in fact, four ways - four major potential lines of research.
As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
