Nitrogen Quotes

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  The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

  Carl Sagan

  Stars, Iron, Apples

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.255, Ballantine Books

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• Nitrogen fertilizer is used on all crops produced in this country, but it is a key plant nutrient to produce corn a critical crop to Illinois farmers.

  John Shimkus

  Country, Illinois, Keys

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• Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.

  Asa Gray

  Animal, Oxygen, Years

  Asa Gray (1880). “Natural Science and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered to the Theological School of Yale College”

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• I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know.

  Arthur Miller

  Talking, Done, Chemicals

  Arthur Miller (1994). “Danger, Memory!: Two Plays”, p.25, Grove Press

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• We sometimes freeze the specimen with liquid nitrogen, which is extremely cold, you know. This is another technique we use now - but the specimens are not alive.

  Lennart Nilsson

  Heart, Technique, Use

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• Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]

  George Wald

  Life, Running, Stars

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• England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty... The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is one of the great discoveries, awaiting the genius of chemists.

  William Crookes

  Food, Science, Discovery

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• Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

  Peter Heller

  Grief, Carbon Cycle, Elements

  FaceBook post by Peter Heller from Jun 12, 2016

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• I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.

  George Wald

  Life, Stars, Science

  "American politics and its interpreters". Book by Louis C. Reichman and Barry J. Wishart (p. 80), 1971.

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• In a certain sense I made a living for five or six years out of that one star [υ Sagittarii] and it is still a fascinating, not understood, star. It's the first star in which you could clearly demonstrate an enormous difference in chemical composition from the sun. It had almost no hydrogen. It was made largely of helium, and had much too much nitrogen and neon. It's still a mystery in many ways ... But it was the first star ever analysed that had a different composition, and I started that area of spectroscopy in the late thirties.

  Jesse L. Greenstein

  Stars, Science, Years

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• I've been experimenting more and more with LN2, liquid nitrogen. I've used it in battle on 'Iron Chef America,' but have also made some great ice creams at home for my family. Since it freezes basically on contact, you can have ice cream ready in mere minutes.

  Cat Cora

  Home, Ice Cream, Iron

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• The oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle - all of these are linked to the existence of life in the sea.

  Sylvia Earle

  Oxygen, Sea, Carbon Cycle

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• We have an atmosphere that is roughly 21% oxygen. The rest of it is largely nitrogen. There's just enough carbon dioxide (CO2) to drive photosynthesis. That has been, throughout the history of our species, pretty stable. Until recently.

  Sylvia Earle

  Oxygen, Atmosphere, Enough

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• Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Struggle, Simple, Oxygen

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

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• I know Teddy Kennedy had fun at the Democratic convention when he said that I said that trees and vegetation caused 80 percent of the air pollution in this country. ... Well, now he was a little wrong about what I said. I didn't say 80 percent. I said 92 percent-93 percent, pardon me. And I didn't say air pollution, I said oxides of nitrogen. Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen. ... If we are totally successful and can eliminate all the manmade oxides of nitrogen, we'll still have 93 percent as much as we have in the air today.

  Ronald Reagan

  Country, Fun, Successful

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• We have decisively changed the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of extinction.

  Rob Nixon

  Carbon Cycle, Extinction, Environment

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• You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

  Lawrence M. Krauss

  Jesus, Stars, Oxygen

  "A Universe From Nothing". Lawrence M. Krauss' speech at the Atheist Alliance International Convention at the Marriot Hotel Convention Center in Burbank, California, www.youtube.com. 2009.

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• All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

  Annie Dillard

  Oxygen, Blood, Iron

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.127, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.

  Michael Pollan

  Appreciation, Mistake, Ignorance

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• And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?

  William McDonough

  Nature, Food, Writing

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• Too often, chefs just want to experiment - they want to use liquid nitrogen before they know how to use heat.

  Tom Colicchio

  Use, Want, Liquid

  "The Hot Seat: Tom Colicchio". Interview with Billie Cohen, www.timeout.com. November 11 2008.

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• Science probes; it does not prove. Imagine Newton's reaction to an objector of his law of gravity who argued that he could not establish a universal law because he had not observed every falling apple, much less proved the law of gravity - there might, after all, be an apple that levitates! Why should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry?

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Struggle, Fall, Simple

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• I believe that at the moment of death, that the soul is released in a molecular form, that actually goes into the - the fabric of the universe, the structure of hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen because we're electrically - we're galvanic, we're electrochemical.

  Dan Aykroyd

  Believe, Oxygen, Soul

  "The Observer Effect" with Ellen Fanning, www.sbs.com.au. October 13, 2013.

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• ....oysters are the only food that never causes indigestion. Indeed, a man would have to eat sixteen dozen of these acephalous molluscs in order to gain the 315 grammes of nitrogen he requires daily.

  Jules Verne

  Men, Order, Oysters

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• We need to go back to our relationship with nature and understand that those trees are our lungs. The earth is recycling as our body. The rivers are our circulation. This air is our breath. And the star stuff, the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen that comes from distant galaxies is actually the molecules of your body.

  Deepak Chopra

  Stars, Air, Rivers

  "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. May 27, 2015.

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