Favorite Quotations
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
— H. G. Wells
We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.
— H. G. Wells
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
— Carl Sagan
It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English — up to fifty words used in correct context — no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
— Carl Sagan
Big whirls have little whirls which feed on their velocity;
Little whirls have smaller whirls and so on to viscosity.
— L. F. Richardson
Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?
— George Eliot, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879.
If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves . . . If the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.
From Atheniensium Republica.
— Aristotle
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
–Letter from Galileo Galilei to Johannes Kepler
I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution
— Werner von Braun
The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery. . . . As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.
— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
Mankind will not remain on Earth forever, but in its quest for light and space will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later will conquer for itself all the space near the Sun.
— Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a ‘hottest part’ implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.
— Richard Davisson
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
— David L. Goodstein, States of Matter
By a small sample, we may judge of the whole piece.
— Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote
“Data! data! data!” he cried impatiently, “I can’t make bricks without clay.”
— Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
— Hans Hoffman
