Kenneth Prewitt quotes

  • One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically.
    -- Kenneth Prewitt

    #Country #Thinking #Data

  • The actual assertion that the Census Bureau could behave in such a way as to tilt things one way or the other way in the partisan sense, is, on the face of it, a silly charge. It's the same Census Bureau that's considered to be incompetent by some people, and then some of the same people are saying that this incompetent agency is so clever and so Machiavellian that it can design a census for partisan reasons.
    -- Kenneth Prewitt

    #Clever #Silly #Agency

  • It's seriously unfortunate when an elected official of the federal government says she's [Michelle Bachmann] going to deliberately break the law. I don't know what kind of signal she thinks that sends, but if she believes that's a good signal, I'm sad for the country. I think that it's deeply, deeply, unfortunate that a member of Congress would, in effect, invite other people who feel that way to say, "Well, I don't have to do it either."
    -- Kenneth Prewitt

    #Country #Believe #Thinking

  • The first presidential veto, by George Washington, was a veto of Alexander Hamilton's formula for apportioning the House, and the one that Washington preferred was one that Thomas Jefferson produced, and that was one partisan issue. The apportionment formula that Jefferson produced gave an extra seat to Virginia. Everybody knew what that game was. Look, partisan interest in the census is simply nothing new.
    -- Kenneth Prewitt

    #Virginia #Games #Issues

  • God requires no person to spend his or her life reiterating the gospel to people who will not receive it. He wants everyone to have an opportunity to hear. Then He would have us move on to other areas. The mistake of the church has been that she sits down to convert all the people in one country to the neglect of the great masses who have never had the chance to hear the gospel - not even once!

  • Into my hear an air that kills through yon far country blows what are those blue remembered hills what spires,what farms are those? that is the land of lost content I can see it shining plain the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

  • To Lawren Harris art was almost a mission. He believed that a country which ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving.

  • Even if my country remains in war with yours. . .remember. . . i am not your enemy.

  • Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.

  • Think it over, think it under.

  • Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.

  • In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

  • On the question of whether a behavioral science can in principle be constructed, we shall take no sides. That some kinds of human behavior can be described and even predicted in terms of objectively verifiable and quantifiable data seems to us to have been established.

  • It is not a medicine. You don't know what's in it. If there were compelling scientific and medical data supporting marijuana's medical benefits that would be one thing. But the data is not there.