Gossip, even when it avoids the sexual, bears around it a faint flavor of the erotic.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields in this, the Academy's 225th year, ... Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.

The Academy takes great pride in honoring the accomplishments of these outstanding and influential individuals, ... Throughout its history, Fellows of the Academy have been dedicated to advancing intellectual thought and constructive action in America and the world. We are confident that our newest group of Fellows will help us fulfill that mission in significant ways.

Like the adolescent, the artist is a dreamer and a revolutionary; like the adolescent, he often finds his accomplishment inadequate to his imaginings. But his dream, setting him apart, helps him to escape the burden of the real.

The cliché that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies.

The vanity of men, a constant insult to women, is also the ground for the implicit feminine claim of superior sensitivity and morality.