American Oriental Society

The American Oriental Society was chartered under the laws of Massachusetts on September 7, 1842. It is one of the oldest learned societies in America, and is the oldest devoted to a particular field of scholarship.

It is closely associated with Yale University, which is the site of its library. The society publishes a journal quarterly, The Journal of the American Oriental Society, the most important American serial publication in the historical languages of Asia. Former presidents include Theodore Dwight Woolsey, James Hadley, W. D. Whitney, Daniel C. Gilman, William H. Ward, Crawford H. Toy, and M. Jastrow, Jr..

Famous quotes containing the words american, oriental and/or society:

    It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
    Henry Miller (1891–1980)

    Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.
    William Barrett (b. 1913)

    Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
    Adam Smith (1723–1790)