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Quotes by Scientist

"For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men."

"We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction."

"In fact, we just surpassed our first 1 million simultaneous users online."

"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."

"The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go."

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."

"The closer the bird is to the surface of the water, the firmer and more inelastic is the uplift of the rising air. The bird appears to almost feel the surface with the tip of its weather wing."

"I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity."

"Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming."

"If we can reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical technology through advances in nanotechnology, we can more widely address the medical conditions that are prevalent and reduce the level of human suffering."

"I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not."

"However, the occasional visit of success provides just the excitement an engineer needs to face work the following day."

"Man has now become an adjunct to perfect and carry forward these conquests."

"If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment."

"But I am not allowed to speak to foreigners and I am not allowed to leave the country. So I'm not so happy."

"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work."

"We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries."

"We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities."

"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."

"The 65,536 processors were inside the Connection Machine."

"Facts are stupid until brought into connection with some general law."

"Logic will get you from A to Z, imagination will get you everywhere."

"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."

"The interpretation of facts in a certain way stimulates other scientists' thoughts."

"The only animals I'm not comfortable with are parrots, but I'm learning as I go. I'm getting better and better at 'em. I really am."

"The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way."

"Before the discovery of agriculture mankind was everywhere so divided, the size of each group being determined by the natural fertility of its locality."

"There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta."

"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."

"The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist."

"I think that by October the whole company has to migrate to OpenOffice, and then I think it's by June next year we all migrate to Linux - you don't want to migrate 6,000 people both operating system and office suite in a single jump."

"As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation."

"Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor."

"User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project."
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