The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation; this is what the humanities provide. Martha Nussbaum

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word. J. Irwin Miller

Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger. Martha Nussbaum

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries – the arts and humanities. Lisa Randall

The arts and humanities are vastly more important in troubled times. Jim Leach

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don’t want to study the social sciences, because it’s not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history. Barney Frank

What use could the humanities be in a digital age? University students focusing on the humanities may end up, at least in their parents’ nightmares, as dog-walkers for those majoring in computer science. But, for me, the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world. Nicholas Kristof

The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education. Ken Robinson

Our culture is more shaped by the arts and humanities than it often is by politics. Jim Leach

As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports. Henry Giroux

Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there’s a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities. Amity Shlaes

We all admire great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities – but we rarely acknowledge how much we achieve in the course of our everyday lives. Marvin Minsky

The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists. Ruth Benedict

The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science. Alain de Botton

I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities. Joshua Lederberg

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more. Jon Secada

I think most of us sense that it is a responsibility of the humanities to try to help better the conduct of human beings in their lives and manifold professional activities. J. Irwin Miller

Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context. Nicholas Kristof

Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the ‘man in white’ dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology. Christian de Duve

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. Mohsin Hamid

I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn’t that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult. Svetlana Alexievich

Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities. Alissa Quart

I’m a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I’m an evangelist of popular culture, but when there’s only media, then there’s going to be a slow debasement of language, and that’s what I think we’re fighting. Camille Paglia

In Greenville, we were blessed to have lots of youth arts programs. I changed middle schools to go to an arts middle school. Then, when high school came, I went to normal high school for a little while before auditioning for the Governor’s School for Arts and Humanities. Danielle Brooks

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. Steven Pinker

The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult. Philip Warren Anderson

I was an English major in college with minors in Fine Arts and Humanities. Sue Grafton

Real men study law and engineering, while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name. Terry Eagleton

I didn’t get a Bachelor’s degree – I got a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts, which means I didn’t have to take humanities, math, and stuff like that. I think I had to take Art History, which I failed a few times. Stephen Furst

As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since. Drew Gilpin

Faust Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions. Siri Hustvedt

The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology. Irving Babbitt

The biology of mind bridges the sciences – concerned with the natural world – and the humanities – concerned with the meaning of human experience. Eric Kandel

Today and always, there will be an obligation to pass on to the new generation the tradition of liberal scholarship – scientific or in the humanities – and to bring the understanding of things and human actions to everyone. Frank Macfarlane Burnet

Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It’s really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition. Sebastian Thrun

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life. Rafael Moneo

I was never very good at school with… humanities… anything which was more a matter of opinion. Terence Tao

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false. Clifford Geertz

I’m big into social studies, the humanities. I really love history and world issues and philosophy and law. Connor Jessup

I think we’ve lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don’t expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that’s a great loss. Martha Nussbaum

The first thing you get from the humanities, when they’re well taught, is critical thinking. Philosophy in particular can play that role, not just in universities but in schools as well. Martha Nussbaum

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy. Camille Paglia

I have a long-term interest in the humanities. Jim Leach

In my junior year of high school, I went to a boarding school for the arts: a school called the Governor’s School for The Arts and Humanities. It was basically a mini-Juilliard – an intense training conservatory for the arts. Teyonah Parris

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that – even if it can’t be quantitatively measured as other subjects – it’s as fundamental to all education. Tom Stoppard

Our world is enriched when coders and marketers dazzle us with smartphones and tablets, but, by themselves, they are just slabs. It is the music, essays, entertainment and provocations that they access, spawned by the humanities, that animate them – and us. Nicholas Kristof

I trained in medicine after pursuing an academic career in the humanities, mainly because of my interest in the relationship between mind and body, and between mind and brain. Iain McGilchrist

In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don’t cost much to be housed. Terry Eagleton

I tried without much success to learn a little of the humanities and the arts, but even passing the courses in art history and music history was a challenge. John C. Mather

I loved everything. I loved sciences and I loved humanities. But ultimately, I felt that in the humanities, you know, you’re writing about things that already exist. But in the sciences, you’re discovering things that no one has known before. Ultimately I chose psychology because it seemed to combine science with things that I liked to think about. Carol S. Dweck

I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities. David McCullough

The humanities are not something that get you a pension and health insurance. Lisa Joy

There is a lot of talk in the academy about the death of the humanities. Based on my readers’ response and their interest in history and literature and art, the death of the humanities has been grossly overstated. Deborah Harkness

The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities. Joseph Stiglitz

I love science and that time in history when science and the humanities were the same thing. Andrew Lincoln

At different times I taught humanities, social sciences and pre-vocational education. Estelle Morris

I’d love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities. Mia Wasikowska

America is very decentralized in how it supports the humanities, unlike European countries where virtually everything stems from the central government. Jim Leach

My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn’t cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford. Nick Denton

In South Carolina, there’s a lot of arts programs. So I was blessed enough to go to the Governor School For Arts & Humanities. Danielle Brooks