Scientist Quotes - Page 17

• British scientists have demonstrated that cigarettes can harm your children. Fair enough. Use an ashtray!

  Jimmy Carr

  Funny, Children, Humor

  "Jimmy Carr's 40 most memorable jokes: One-liners and videos galore to mark comic's 40th birthday" by Rob Leigh, www.mirror.co.uk. September 14, 2012.

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• A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time. The more of the context of a problem that a scientist can comprehend, the greater are his chances of finding a truly adequate solution.

  Russell L. Ackoff

  Space, Risk, Adequate

  "The Development of Operations Research as a Science". Operations Research, Volume 4, No. 3, pp. 265-295, www.jstor.org. June 1956.

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• It is the responsibility of those of us involved in today's biomedical research enterprise to translate the remarkable scientific innovations we are witnessing into health gains for the nation. At no other time has the need for a robust, bidirectional information flow between basic and translational scientists been so necessary.

  Elias Zerhouni

  Responsibility, Innovation, Information

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• Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward?

  David R. Brower

  Moving, Land, Garbage

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• A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. Thus the Master is available to all people and doesn't reject anyone. He is ready to use all situations and doesn't waste anything. This is called embodying the light. What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job? If you don't understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.

  Laozi

  Teacher, Jobs, Men

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• Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that 'language' themselves just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs. Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way.

  Howard S. Becker

  Musical, Needs, Use

  "Visual Research Methods". Book by Peter Hamilton, 2006.

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• There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn't. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientists to say that he believes in the Resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Jesus, Believe

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.120, Knopf

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• From the cranberry cancer scare of the 1950s to the Alar-in-apples hysteria of the 1980s, from the "new ice age" of the 1960s to the "global warming" of the 1990s, environmental alarms almost always turn out to be false. Few non-political scientists fear ozone loss, global warming, or acid rain. These are just issues that some people hope to use to reorder the lives of the rest of us.

  Harry Browne

  Cancer, Rain, Loss

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• Outside the practice of science itself, scientists have sometimes been the greatest offenders in adhering to dogmatic ideas against all the evidence.

  Mary Hesse

  Science, Ideas, Practice

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• Survival means the survival of human kind as a whole, not just a part of it. If the South cannot survive, then the North is going to crumble. If countries of Third World cannot pay their debts, you are going to suffer here in the North. If you do not take care of the Third World, your well-being is not going to last, and you will not be able to continue living in the way you have been much longer. It is leaping out at us already. You cannot leave the job to the governments or the political scientists alone. You have to do it yourself.

  Nhat Hanh

  Country, Jobs, Mean

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• There is a point of no return after which warming becomes unstoppable - and we are probably going to sail right through it. It is the point at which anthropogenic (human-caused) warming triggers huge releases of carbon dioxide from warming oceans, or similar releases of both carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost, or both. Most climate scientists think that point lies not far beyond 2 degrees C hotter (3.6 degrees F).

  Gwynne Dyer

  Lying, Ocean, Thinking

  "Four harsh truths about climate change" by Gwynne Dyerer, www.woodstocksentinelreview.com. December 4, 2008.

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• Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.

  Werner Herzog

  Community, Environmental, Climate

  "Encounters at the End of the World". www.imdb.com. July 18, 2008.

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• It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Philosophical, Thinking, Analysis

  Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.88, University of Chicago Press

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• But scientists on both sides of the iron curtain played a very significant role in maintaining the momentum of the nuclear arms race throughout the four decades of the Cold War.

  Joseph Rotblat

  War, Heart, Race

  Joseph Rotblat, Daisaku Ikeda (2007). “A Quest for Global Peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on War, Ethics and the Nuclear Threat”, p.130, I.B.Tauris

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• I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.

  Terri Windling

  Math, Skills, Wanted

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• Goethe died in 1832. As you know, Goethe was very active in science. In fact, he did some very good scientific work in plant morphology and mineralogy. But he was quite bitter at the way in which many scientists refused to grant him a hearing because he was a poet and therefore, they felt, he couldn't be serious.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Facts, Serious, Way

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• Self-esteem is reliance on one's power to think. It cannot be replaced by one's power to deceive. The self-confidence of a scientist and the self-confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states, and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self-confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic.

  Ayn Rand

  Confidence, Self Esteem, Men

  "The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z".

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• You frighten a lot of scientists. If they say that climate is not changing, they lose their research grants. And some people cannot afford that; they become silent, or a few of us speak up, because we think that it's for the honesty of science, that we have to do it.

  Nils-Axel Morner

  Honesty, Fear, Thinking

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• I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Beautiful, Philosophy, Flower

  "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". Book by Richard P. Feynman, "The Making of a Scientist," p. 11, 1988.

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• Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Country, Blessed, Animal

  "The Endangered Species Act: Preserving Wildlife, Wonder and Our Natural Heritage for 40 Years" by Jamie Rappaport Clark, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 2, 2013.

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• Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Attitude, Passion, Character

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• Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a Nobel Laureate; he was everything one thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition. Actually most Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar's exposition.

  Richard Dawkins

  Reading, Science, Trying

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• I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

  Bobby Fischer

  Games, Chess, Form

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• I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Believe, Teaching, School

  "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

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• The greatest scientists are artists as well.

  Albert Einstein

  Artist, Wells, Art And Science

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.379, Princeton University Press

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