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Quotes by Scientist
"If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable."
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"I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it."
Idea,
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"It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it."
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"Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth."
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"When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well."
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"They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being."
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"In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) than to allow an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity."
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"The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."
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"X-Ray crystallography is nowadays an accurate and rapid method of determining conformation in the crystal lattice, which conformation usually corresponds to the preferred conformation in solution."
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"As I look back on the last few decades of my life, I am struck by the good fortune that came my way."
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"What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse."
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"What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others."
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"The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours."
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"It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset."
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"In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems."
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"I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done."
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"Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues."
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"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me."
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"Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy."
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"The geographical isolation and lack of television made world happenings and problems seem remote."
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"I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number."
45
"What would you consider a good job?" Answered as follows:"A good job is one in which I don't have to work, and get paid a lot of money."When I heard that I cheered and yelled and felt that he should be given an A+, for he had perfectly articulated the American dream of those who despise knowledge. What a politician that kid would have made."
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"It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy."
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"A potato can grow quite easily on a very small plot of land. With molecular manufacturing, we'll be able to have distributed manufacturing, which will permit manufacturing at the site using technologies that are low-cost and easily available."
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"Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy."
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"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly."
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"Intensity like signal strength will generally fall off with distance from the source, although it also depends on the local conditions and the pathway from the source to the point."
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"Because now it's the fans out there that are entertaining us, the developers, with their creations!"
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"Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation."
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"As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, "Life was better since the government came because "a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot."
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"Ideas tell a lot about a person who generated them."
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"Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot."
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"Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power, or debased by the habit of obedience; but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive."
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"The war project at Stanford was essentially completed, and I accepted an offer of an Assistant Professorship at the University of Minnesota, which had a good biochemistry department."
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