Samuel Ichiye “S. I.” Hayakawa (1906–92) was a Canadian-born American academic and politician of Japanese ancestry. He was an English professor, and served as president of San Francisco State University and then as United States Senator from California from 1977 to 1983.
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by S. I. Hayakawa
By the definition accepted in the United States, any person with even a small amount of Negro Blood… is a Negro. Logically, it would be exactly as justifiable to say that any person with even a small amount of white blood is white. Why do they say one rather than the other? Because the former classification suits the convenience of those making the classification. Society, in short, regards as true those systems that produce the desired results. Science seeks only the most generally useful systems of classification; these it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented, as true.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: America
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Culture
It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Self-Discovery, Self-Knowledge, Discovery, Awareness
Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, “I have failed three times,” and what happens when he says, “I am a failure”.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Failure
If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A’s to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Society
I’m going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Truth
Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Justice
In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Books, Reading, Life and Living
You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you’re arguing is because you’re using different words.
—S. I. Hayakawa
Topics: Conversation
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