The Impossible Takes Longer (14 page)
Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
801. I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
802. The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.
Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906
803. A scientist belongs to his country in times of war and to all mankind in times of peace.
FritzHaber
CHEMISTRY, 1918
804. The state is primarily an organization for killing foreigners, that's its main purpose. There are, of course, other things they do. They do a certain amount of educating, but in the course of educating you try very hard to make the young think it is a grand thing to kill foreigners.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
805. There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976
806. Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976
807. Economists possess their full share of the common ability to invent and commit errors . . . perhaps their most common error is to believe other economists.
Joseph Stigler
ECONOMICS, 1982
808. The single biggest misunderstanding built into the mentality of the popular culture is that one person's gain is another person's loss.
James Heckman
ECONOMICS, 2000
809. The only information that is of value in a financial market is information that other people don't have.
Herbert Simon
ECONOMICS, 1978
810. Modern high-tech warfare is designed to remove physical contact: dropping bombs from 50,000 feet ensures that one does not "feel" what one does. Modern economic management is similar: from one's luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about which one would think twice if one knew the people whose fives one was destroying.
Joseph Stiglitz
ECONOMICS, 2001
811. Unless you're poor, you don't know what poor means. It means you get up in the morning and start killing cockroaches in the bathtub. It means wearing old clothes that make the other kids laugh at you. It means not being able to eat peaches until the end of August... To this day, I still feel different. It still hurts a litde. Maybe that's why I work so hard for acceptance. I don't like Polish jokes. I don't like people who tease other people. I don't like anything that makes people feel badly about themselves.
Arno Penzias
PHYSICS, 1978
812. The uneven division of power and wealth, the wide differences of health and comfort among the nations of mankind, are the sources of discord in the modern world, its major challenge and, unrelieved, its moral doom.
Patrick Blackett
PHYSICS, 1948
813. "I'm learnin' one thing good," she said. "Learnin' it all the time and ever' day. If you're in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help—the only ones."
John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962
814. The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France
LITERATURE, 1921
815. It may be that poor people are the only ones who commit crimes, but I do know that they are the only ones who serve prison sentences.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
816. Peace is inextricably linked to poverty. Poverty is a threat to peace. Ninety-four percent of the world income goes to forty percent of the population while sixty percent of people live on only six percent of world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day. Over one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is no formula for peace.
Muhammad Yunus
PEACE, 2006
817. People living in poverty and desperation will not hesitate to destroy the environment if they believe that in doing so their needs will be met.
Wangari Maathai
PEACE, 2004
818. Since pharmaceutical companies operate for profit then of course people in Africa have another disease called money deficiency disease, and therefore, it's not worthwhile their trying to produce cures for people who can't pay for them.
Sydney Brenner
MEDICINE, 2002
819. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976
820. The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925
In 1903, Albert Michelson declared that "the more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered." Twenty-five years later, after learning of the Dirac equation, Max Born asserted that "physics as we know it will be over in six months." Both of these scientists are refuted every October, as new Nobel laureates are announced in Stockholm, and the world grapples with the significance of their discoveries.
Scientists are no more immune than ordinary mortals to the temptation of soothsaying, especially when they step outside their area of specialization. John Strutt, better known as Lord Rayleigh, averred in 1896 that he had "not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning." Ernest Rutherford was one of many scientists who doubted that the atom would ever yield significant power. John Cornforth told Dorothy Hodgkin, "If that's the formula of penicillin, I'll give up chemistry and grow mushrooms." Edward Purcell said in 1952, "All this stuff about traveling around the universe in space suits . . . belongs back where it came from, on the cereal box."
With many controversies, it is possible to count Nobel laureates on both sides: fluoridation of water, atomic energy, Intelligent Design, the big bang, welfare economics, the existence of God. But more significant than their differences are their areas
of agreement: in the importance of science and in the freedom to pursue it.
821. The sole aim of science is the glory of the human spirit.
Gerhard Herzberg
CHEMISTRY, 1971
822. Science is imagination in the service of the verifiable truth.
Gerald Edelman
MEDICINE, 1972
823. Let us be clear about it. What science can do, it will do, some time, somewhere, whatever obstacles may be put in its way.
Christian de Duve
MEDICINE, 1974
824. The scientific equations we seek are the poetry of nature.
Chen Ning Yang
PHYSICS, 1957
825. If you thought that science was certain—well that is just an error on your part.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
826. Real science, as opposed to its entrepreneurial image, has a strict taboo against lying. We need this taboo to guard against wasting scarce and valuable resources, such as one's life, on false leads.
Robert Laughlin
PHYSICS, 1998
827. I now regard my former belief in the superiority of science over other forms of human thought and behavior as a self-deception . . . In 19211 believed . . . that science produced an objective knowledge of the world, which is governed by deterministic laws. The scientific method seemed to me superior to other, more subjective ways of forming a picture of the world—philosophy, poetry and religion; and I even thought the unambiguous language of science to be a step towards a better understanding between human beings. In 19511 believed in none of these things.
Max Born
PHYSICS, 1954
828. I think one could say that a certain modesty toward understanding nature is a precondition to the continued pursuit of science.
Subramanyan Chandrasekhar
PHYSICS, 1983
829. Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
Albert Szent-Györgyi
MEDICINE, 1937
830. I'm convinced that a controlled disrespect for authority is essential to a scientist.
Luis Alvarez
PHYSICS, 1968
831. Of course scientists have been told to be socially responsible. Of course, I think society ought to be scientifically responsible as well.
Sydney Brenner
MEDICINE, 2002
832. You don't need to be bright to be a scientist, you just need to be persistent as hell.
Dudley Herschbach
CHEMISTRY, 1986
833. You might have thought I was a strange kid for the things I did. I buried my hamster after it died, then dug it up a while later to see what it looked like.
Linda Buck
MEDICINE, 2004
834. You know, most American scientists are duds; they never have read a sensible book.
SalvadorLuria
MEDICINE, 1969
835. One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
James Watson
MEDICINE, 1962
836. Dr. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to: send an autograph/help you in your project/provide a photograph/read your manuscript/cure your disease/ deliver a lecture/be interviewed/attend a conference/talk on the radio/act as chairman /appear on TV/become an editor/speak after dinner/write a book/give a testimonial/accept an honorary degree.
Francis Crick
MEDICINE, 1962
837. All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford
CHEMISTRY, 1908
838. Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
839. Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
Eugene Wigner
PHYSICS, 1963
840. We use the wave theory on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and the particle theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
William Henry Bragg
PHYSICS, 1915
841. The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and vice versa.
Werner Heisenberg
PHYSICS, 1932
This is the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" regarding subatomic particles
842. My ambition is to live to see all of physics reduced to a formula so elegant and simple that it will fit easily on the front of a T-shirt.
Leon Lederman
PHYSICS, 1988
843. The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
Ernest Rutherford
CHEMISTRY, 1908
844. At Los Alamos I learned that, by and large, physicists were extraordinary people. The complete intellectual integrity required in the pursuit of physics carried over into the personal relationships of physicists.
Val Fitch
PHYSICS, 1980
845. When I was young I thought that physics was easy and relations with women difficult. Now it is just the other way around.
Wolfgang Pauli
PHYSICS, 1945
846. I was lucky enough to look over the good Lord's shoulder while He was at work.
Werner Heisenberg
PHYSICS, 1932
847. Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my Department.
Ernest Rutherford
CHEMISTRY, 1908
848. We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.
Max Born
PHYSICS, 1954
849. What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its evolution . . . If you're religious, it's like looking at God. The order is so beautiful and the symmetry so beautiful that you think there is some design behind it.
George F. Smoot
PHYSICS, 2006
850. What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
851. For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained—and that's our present universe.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
852. The very matter of the universe is transient. We're fortunate enough to live in this period when there is matter.
Sheldon Glashow
PHYSICS, 1979
853. There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.
Hannes Aljvén
PHYSICS, 1970
854. Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
PaulDirac
PHYSICS, 1933
855. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg
PHYSICS, 1979
856. A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.
JacquesMonod
MEDICINE, 1965
857. The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty.
Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987
858. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.
George Wald
MEDICINE, 1967
859. One of the elementary rules of nature is that, in the absence of law prohibiting an event or phenomenon it is bound to occur with some degree of probability. To put it simply and crudely: Anything that
can
happen
does
happen.
Paul Dirac
PHYSICS, 1933
860. Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.
Max Delbrück
MEDICINE, 1969
861. Evolution consists largely of molecular tinkering-producing new objects from old odds and ends.
François Jacob
MEDICINE, 1965
862. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
George Wald
MEDICINE, 1967
863. Chance alone is the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free, but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution.
Jacques Monod
MEDICINE, 1965
864. Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.