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Quotes by Scientist
"I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence."
16
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
16
"I think and think for months for years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right."
16
"It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men."
16
"Some old and unrealized ideas will undoubtedly be actualized when their time comes."
16
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions."
16
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed."
16
"Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world."
16
"The corals do not look much worn, but still appear to have been dead. There are some delicate shells of molluscs from depths beyond 500 fathoms, where they were certainly living."
16
"Out of clutter, find simplicity."
16
"Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time.""Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly."
16
"Thus, an inhibition center developed below what in humans is the temporal lobe, to turn off much of the functioning of the reptilian brain; and an activation center evolved in the pons to turn on the R-complex, but harmlessly, during sleep."
16
"Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another."
16
"Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain."
16
"The right to search for the truth implies also a duty, one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth."
16
"People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs."
16
"The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat."
16
"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes."
16
"Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business."
16
"Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist."
16
"Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain."
16
"Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex."
16
"[In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision."
16
"The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy - to heal, as it is termed."
16
"The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls."
16
"In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships."
16
"A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos."
16
"Many criminologists believe that the source of the state's pacifying effect isn't just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned."
16
"Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you."
16
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
16
"Any book worth banning is a book worth reading."
16
"I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great."
16
"Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends."
16
"Beauty arises out of human inspiration."
16
"Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us."
16
"The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men."
16
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