Unexpected Quotes - Page 32

• The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.

  Samuel Gompers

  Order, People, Freedom Of Speech

  Samuel Gompers (1967). “Seventy Years of Life and Labour: An Autobiography”

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• 'It's this accursed Science,' I cried. 'It's the very Devil. The mediaeval priests and persecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it-and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way.'

  George Herbert

  Science, Devil, Way

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• [Science] is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. ... The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Self, Two

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.362, Ballantine Books

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• At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum and in the continuous spectrum of a flame, their position being identical with that of Fraunhofer's lines. Hence the path is opened for the determination of the chemical composition of the Sun and the fixed stars.

  Robert Bunsen

  Determination, Stars, Sleep

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• Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find it, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.

  Heraclitus

  Science, Discovery, Difficulty

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• [In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define "serendipity" as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road.

  Irving Langmuir

  Art, Freedom, Science

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• Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

  Freeman Dyson

  Nature, Art, Philosophy

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• Every man should make his son or daughter learn some useful trade or profession, so that in these days of changing fortunes of being rich today and poor tomorrow they may have something tangible to fall back upon. This provision might save many persons from misery, who by some unexpected turn of fortune have lost all their means.

  P. T. Barnum

  Daughter, Mother, Fall

  P.t. Barnum (2015). “Golden Rules for Making Money”

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• My life was very tenuous last year. My daughter's death, in March in 2007, was unexpected. It was a shock. I didn't know if I'd survive it.

  Phoebe Snow

  Daughter, Mother, Years

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• As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

  Etty Hillesum

  Gratitude, Unexpected Gifts, Expectations

  Etty Hillesum, K. A. D. Smelik, Arnold Pomerans (2002). “Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943”, p.466, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Gratitude is most treasured when it is unexpected. When we expect, even demand gratitude, we treat it simply as payment due for some service we rendered and we squeeze any good feeling out of it.

  Michael Josephson

  Gratitude, Being Thankful, Feelings

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• Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Christian, Believe, Civilization

  Hilaire Belloc (2017). “The Great Heresies”, p.95, Ignatius Press

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• The hybridoma technology was a by-product of basic research. Its success in practical applications is to a large extent the result of unexpected and unpredictable properties of the method. It thus represents another clear-cut example of the enormous practical impact of an investment in research which might not have been considered commercially worthwhile, or of immediate medical relevance. It resulted from esoteric speculations, for curiosity's sake, only motivated by a desire to understand nature.

  Cesar Milstein

  Success, Nature, Cutting

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• Astronomy may be revolutionized more than any other field of science by observations from above the atmosphere. Study of the planets, the Sun, the stars, and the rarified matter in space should all be profoundly influenced by measurements from balloons, rockets, probes and satellites. ... In a new adventure of discovery no one can foretell what will be found, and it is probably safe to predict that the most important new discovery that will be made with flying telescopes will be quite unexpected and unforeseen.

  Lyman Spitzer

  Stars, Adventure, Science

  Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 17, No. 5, p. 191, 194, May 1961.

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• The progress of science has always been the result of a close interplay between our concepts of the universe and our observations on nature. The former can only evolve out of the latter and yet the latter is also conditioned greatly by the former. Thus in our exploration of nature, the interplay between our concepts and our observations may sometimes lead to totally unexpected aspects among already familiar phenomena.

  Tsung-Dao Lee

  Nature, Science, Progress

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• The test of a theory is its ability to cope with all the relevant phenomena, not its a priori 'reasonableness'. The latter would have proved a poor guide in the development of science, which often makes progress by its encounter with the totally unexpected and initially extremely puzzling.

  John Polkinghorne

  Science, Progress, Encounters

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• The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution.

  Verlyn Klinkenborg

  Real, Moving, Science

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• The experiment left no doubt that, as far as accuracy of measurement went, the resistance disappeared. At the same time, however, something unexpected occurred. The disappearance did not take place gradually but abruptly. From 1/500 the resistance at 4.2K, it could be established that the resistance had become less than a thousand-millionth part of that at normal temperature. Thus the mercury at 4.2K has entered a new state, which, owing to its particular electrical properties, can be called the state of superconductivity.

  Heike Kamerlingh Onnes

  Science, Doubt, Owing

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• Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

  Philip Roth

  Epic, Pages, Way

  FaceBook post by Philip Roth from Dec 22, 2016

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• With the word creative we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light - by grace, one feels, rather than deserving, for it always is something given, free, unsought, unexpected.

  P. L. Travers

  Creativity, Light, Creative

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• She would consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences.

  Paulo Coelho

  Inspirational, Life, Numbers

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• We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.

  Charles de Lint

  Life, Ideas, Appreciate

  Charles de Lint (2007). “Tapping the Dream Tree”, p.212, Macmillan

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• I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

  Pam Houston

  Writing, Light, Things In Life

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• In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It's my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality.

  John Elder Robison

  Blow, Past, People

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• A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

  Jaron Lanier

  Real, Weirdness, Introducing

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.53, Vintage

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