Author and Planet Definition Committee member Dava Sobel, on the reclassification of Pluto: "Pluto will lend its name to a newly defined category of planets - the 'plutons' - which differ from the other planets by virtue of their highly inclined, elongated orbits, which take more than two centuries to complete and which suggest a different origin. As the prototype of this class, Pluto may still attract funny remarks, but it will have gained new significance."
The late novelist E.M. Forster ("A Passage to India," "A Room With a View"): "Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."
Syracuse University Professor Arthur Burns, on Harvard's decision to end its early admissions program: "When Harvard abandons early admissions it incurs little cost, but enhances a useful tool for second-tier universities competing for good students - those sufficiently ambitious and on-the-ball to write applications in October."
National Review Online's Mark Goldblatt, on the guilt inhering in contemporary liberalism: "The trappings of achievement - prestigious job titles, comfortable homes, swollen bank accounts - are a kind of inverse torment for such people, an ongoing crisis of authenticity, a sign of the dissolution of their identity within the marginalized group. They feel compelled, therefore, to demonstrate that their sympathies still reside with the underclass."
Scholar and author Shelby Steele: "White guilt affects everything having to do with race in America. . . . (It) undermines black progress and race relations because it generates disingenuous racial policies - diversity, affirmative action and welfare without expectations (until the late'90s). These policies enable whites to fend off the racist stigma they live with but rob blacks of the incentive to work harder for their own advancement. All these 'white guilt' policies ask nothing whatsoever of blacks. They are an incentive to weakness rather than strength."