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Quotes by Scientist
"The experience reminds me of a favorite saying: Most of the yield from research efforts comes from the coal that is mined while looking for diamonds."
37
"I and my colleagues here have been engaged in the pursuit of knowledge."
37
"We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records."
37
"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."
37
"The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective."
Time,
37
"The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours; because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved."
37
"Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors."
37
"I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it."
37
"It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry."
37
"I see harm reduction as a way of engaging people as part of that path to recovery."
37
"Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book."
37
"Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children."
37
"We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."
37
"Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history."
37
"I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had."
37
"Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'."
37
"True character arises from a deeper well than religion."
37
"It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance."
37
"I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey."
37
"The concept of war crimes is an American invention."
37
"Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance."
37
"A common allegiance to form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known."
37
"The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform."
37
"I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information."
37
"We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space."
37
"The Nobel Prize gives one the opportunity to take public stands."
37
"I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing."
37
"I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence."
37
"Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever."
37
"I have a tendency to be lucky and make the right choices based on limited information."
37
"The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words."
37
"I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved."
37
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