Vi Putnam Quotes

What really matters from the point of view of social capital and civic engagement is not merely nominal membership, but active and involved membership.

Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate.

Our national myths often exaggerate the role of the individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort.

No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.

Cut the pie any way you like, "meanings" just ain't in the head!

... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

While there is such a thing as correctness in ethics, in interpretation, in mathematics, the way to understand that is not by trying to model it on the ways in which we get things right in physics.

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!

Most Americans watch Friends rather than having friends.

Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes! Then fire low!

How well you do in life shouldn't depend on how well your parents did.

I can only please one person per day. Today isn't your day, tomorrow doesn't look good either.

Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.

Positive people have more friends which is a key factor of happiness and longevity.

Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement

None of the people watching 'Big Brother' will bring you chicken soup if you get sick.

An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.

A good horse is a man's best friend in time of danger.

... my whole existence is governed by abstract ideas.... the ideal must be preserved regardless of fact.

Look, we ought to do this for our kids... We ought to have a high school so that every kid who grows up here - they're all our kids - gets a good high school education.

To-day women constitute the only class of sane people excluded from the franchise.

Until changing economic conditions made the thing actually happen, struggling early society would hardly have guessed that woman's road to gentility would lie through doing nothing at all.

the true lady is in theory either a virgin or a lawful wife.

The lady ... is an anomaly to which the western nations of this planet have grown accustomed but which would require a great deal of explanation before a Martian could understand her.

The lady is proverbial for her skill in eluding definition ... she may be described merely as the female of the favored social class.

In contemporary society [the typical lady] is an archaism, and can't hardly understand herself unless she knows her own history.

As the gentleman decays, the lady survives as the strongest evidence of his former predominance.

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person.

Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.