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Quotes by Scientist

"I think you know that I classify science as British science, American science, and everybody else."

"By moving them vertically, a representative mean curve could be formed, and individual events were then characterized by individual logarithmic differences from the standard curve."

"After all, I long to be in America again, nay, if I can go home to return no more to Europe, it seems to me that I shall ever enjoy more peace of mind, and even Physical comfort than I can meet with in any portion of the world beside."


"In those days I was terrible at athletics and never made a team, but quite easily led my class in academics."

"In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?"

"I've seen disgusting excess in business, and I've seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I've certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can't ignore it, especially when you get into telecom."

"I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce."


"Lord, deliver me from the man who never makes a mistake, and also from the man who makes the same mistake twice."


"If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny."


"Upon receiving my notification of acceptance to the university, my parents noticed that they were obliged to submit to the university, among other things, a copy of my official family register. After much mental anguish, they decided to inform me of the secret of my birth."

"There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational."

"I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects."


"Impatience translates itself into a desire to have something immediate done about it all, and, as is generally the case with impatience, resolves itself in the easiest way that lies ready to hand."

"The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy."

"Daoist thought is the root of science and technology in China."

"There are things that I would say that you could call an instant of time; or better, a now. As we live we seem to move through a succession of instants of time, nows, and the question is, what are they? There are where everything in the universe is at this moment, now."

"You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut."

"In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA."

"When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit."

"The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented."

"We genuinely believe to this day that it was an honest genuine mistake and we never imagined the punishment would be eight months. The precedent dictated that it was unlikely to be that. We don't regret he played for that period."

"Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection."


"In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment."

"The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life."

"I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done."

"The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried."

"I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it."

"There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything."
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