"Astronauts [returning from weightless conditions] who tilt their heads feel like they're moving sideways, which is why there's this big debate over whether they [or a computerized autopilot] should be allowed to land the Space Shuttle."

--Jan Élise Holly (mathematics), in a lecture titled "Why, Really, Do Pilots Become Disoriented Enough to Crash," about her research for NASA on mathematical models for predicting the types of disorientation that occur when humans are subjected to unusual motion conditions.

"Dispositional optimism is a good thing. There is tons and tons of evidence that being an optimistic person, generally, is related to less heart disease, less cancer, all sorts of things."

--Bill Klein (psychology), in a talk, "Positive and Negative Health Implications of Optimism."

"A case can be made that local capital is better than transnational capital."

--John Milton Talbot (sociology), in a talk on how tea-, coffee- and cocoa-producing nations are affected when they build commodity chains from the bottom up as opposed to having foreign-based corporations control processing and distribution.

"On the other hand, I've had a lot of support from some of the goodest, oldest boys in Civil War history."

--Elizabeth Leonard (history), at a round-table discussion titled "Bias, Discrimination and the Historian's Craft," after describing hostility she has experienced for daring to suggest that women's history from the Civil War era is important.

"Scandal has a thousand stringers; good news doesn't know the editor's phone number."

--William Raspberry, 1999 Lovejoy Award recipient, on the relative ease of finding and writing negative news stories.

"A key to Hitler's power over the Germans was his ability as a speaker, which he and others discovered in revolutionary Munich in 1919. Here, historical empathy loses me. I find it impossible to feel the appeal of his speeches, which to me are a mass of angry, bellicose and petty moralistic barking. But in the context of the brutalization of politics through the First World War and the revolutionary period in its wake, I can understand that his rhetoric appealed to something larger--although it never captured the loyalty of the majority in an open society (until 1933)."

--Raffael Scheck (history), in a talk, "Who Was Hitler?"

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