Quotes on Credentials

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.

The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials. You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach. All you need is the willingness to read.

When I started, the press credentials said 'No women or children in the press box,' ... There are a lot of things in the workplace that you can attempt to hide, and I could not hide the fact that I was a woman. I was always the only woman in the press box, and they didn't even have ladies rooms.

My career got off to a very shaky start when I dropped out of school at the age of 18. Despite my lack of academic credentials, I got a job as a fashion assistant at 'Harper's & Queen.'

I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.

As I talk about strengths and weaknesses in academic economics, one interesting fact you are entitled to know is that I never took a course in economics. And with this striking lack of credentials, you may wonder why I have the chutzpah to be up here giving this talk. The answer is I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it.

I do not pretend to be a divine man, but I do believe in divine guidance, divine power, and in the fulfillment of divine prophecy. I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials.

I'm skeptical of a lot of what falls under the rubric of education.... People are on these tracks. They are getting these credentials and it's very unclear how viable they are in many cases.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? One of the most dangerous and terrifying trends in America today is the disregard for character as a central necessity in a leader's credentials. The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.