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Quotes by Scientist
"I would argue that a truly developed country would be beyond Presidents and Kings. In a world with some semblance of equality, each liberal-minded woman, each gay person, and indeed almost every person could be their own President. In a world of equals, what real service does a ruler provide?"
21
"I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult."
21
"In my opinion, the author-level metric can distort a real author's citation impact. For example, an author who has an h-index = 2 obtained on the basis of two published papers of which each is cited twenty times is more influential than an author who has an h-index = 3 obtained on the basis of three published papers of which each is cited three times."
21
"Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves."
21
"The stopping of the Judicial courts, had been blended, in the minds of some people, with the redress of grievances considered only as a mode of awakening the attention of the legislature."
21
"Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?""From you, Pappa", I said."From me? I don't know any of this"."You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it. Once I learned to value it, the rest came without trouble."- Isaac Asimov (Isaak Yudovich Ozimov). It's been a good life."
21
"The psychological components of war have not gone away-dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception."
21
"It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants."
21
"PARAPHRASE: Genius is not that you are smarter than everyone else. It is that you are ready to receive the inspiration."
21
"It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible."
21
"In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery."
21
"Take a tram ride today. Recognise a dear friend in everyone around. Speak kindly to yourself. It is only your thoughts that bring you fear. You've been through a lot. There is perfect peace in this moment."
21
"Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance."
21
"Nothing happens until something moves."
21
"So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?"
21
"My mother speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother's anxiety."
21
"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time - proof that humans can work magic."
21
"In general, people accumulate knowledge gradually over a long period of time. However, there are extraordinary people all around us, who are capable of accumulating impressive amounts of knowledge within a relatively short period of time. Nevertheless, even the greatest genius possesses only a small fraction of all knowledge known by mankind. Finally, the following question arises: how large is all the existing knowledge in comparison to the space of ignorance?"
21
"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them."
21
"To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever."
21
"Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface."
21
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it's two hours. That's relativity."
21
"Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up?"
21
"It is the theory that decides what can be observed."
21
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
21
"The primary goal of a vendor is to make money."
21
"Shoes and clothing damage our ability to survive naked in the wilderness."
21
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
20
"By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu."
20
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