Deists

"Farsighted theologians are now working to mine the eternal metal from the teachings of Jesus and to forge it for all time."

"We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future."

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

"I also knew the formula that expresses the energy distribution in the normal spectrum. A theoretical interpretation therefore had to be found at any cost, no matter how high. It was clear to me that classical physics could offer no solution to this problem, and would have meant that all energy would eventually transfer from matter to radiation. ...This approach was opened to me by maintaining the two . The two laws, it seems to me, must be upheld under all circumstances. For the rest, I was ready to sacrifice every one of my previous convictions about physical laws. ...[One] finds that the continuous loss of energy into radiation can be prevented by assuming that energy is forced at the outset to remain together in certain quanta. This was purely a formal assumption and I really did not give it much thought except that no matter what the cost, I must bring about a positive result."

"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment."

"Als Physiker, der sein ganzes Leben der nüchternen Wissenschaft, der Erforschung der Materie widmete, bin ich sicher von dem Verdacht frei, für einen Schwarmgeist gehalten zu werden. Und so sage ich nach meinen Erforschungen des Atoms dieses: Es gibt keine Materie an sich. Alle Materie entsteht und besteht nur durch eine Kraft, welche die Atomteilchen in Schwingung bringt und sie zum winzigsten Sonnensystem des Alls zusammenhält. Da es im ganzen Weltall aber weder eine intelligente Kraft noch eine ewige Kraft gibt—es ist der Menschheit nicht gelungen, das heißersehnte Perpetuum mobile zu erfinden—so müssen wir hinter dieser Kraft einen bewußten intelligenten Geist annehmen. Dieser Geist ist der Urgrund aller Materie."

"Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist. … Eine neue große wissenschaftliche Idee pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner allmählich überzeugt und bekehrt werden — daß aus einem Saulus ein Paulus wird, ist eine große Seltenheit —, sondern vielmehr in der Weise, dass die Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Idee vertraut gemacht wird. Auch hier heißt es wieder: Wer die Jugend hat, der hat die Zukunft."

"The energy and entropy of the world have no meaning, because such quantities admit of no accurate definition."

"Experimenters are the shocktroops of science… An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. But before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned – the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted – Nature’s answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of theorists, who find himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics."

"Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but — which is even worse — also any prospects at a better future."

"It [science] has as its highest principle and most coveted aim the solution of the problem to condense all natural phenomena which have been observed and are still to be observed into one simple principle, that allows the computation of past and more especially of future processes from present ones. ...Amid the more or less general laws which mark the achievements of physical science during the course of the last centuries, the principle of least action is perhaps that which, as regards form and content, may claim to come nearest to that ideal final aim of theoretical research."

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination."

"That God existed before there were human beings on Earth, that He holds the entire world, believers and non-believers, in His omnipotent hand for eternity, and that He will remain enthroned on a level inaccessible to human comprehension long after the Earth and everything that is on it has gone to ruins; those who profess this faith and who, inspired by it, in veneration and complete confidence, feel secure from the dangers of life under protection of the Almighty, only those may number themselves among the truly religious."

"To believe in science, one must believe in the rationality of the world."

"It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him."

"In other words, the fundamental principles and indispensable postulates of every genuinely productive science are not based on pure logic but rather on the metaphysical hypothesis — which no rules of logic can refute — that there exists an outer world which is entirely independent of ourselves. It is only through the immediate dictate of our consciousness that we know that this world exists. And that consciousness may to a certain degree be called a special sense."

"But science sets out confidently on the endeavor finally to know the thing in itself, and even though we realize that this ideal goal can never be completely reached, still we struggle on towards it untiringly. And we know that at every step of the way each effort will be richly rewarded."

"The first and most important quality of all scientific ways of thinking must be the clear distinction between the outer object of observation and the subjective nature of the observer."

"Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with."

"Again and again the imaginary plan on which one attempts to build up that order breaks down and then we must try another. This imaginative vision and faith in the ultimate success are indispensable. The pure rationalist has no place here."

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."

"Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view."

"Natural science wants man to learn, religion wants him to act."

"Long and tedious reflection cannot enable us to shape our decisions and attitudes properly; only that definite and clear instruction which we gain can form a direct inner link to God. This instruction alone is able to give us the inner firmness and lasting peace of mind which must be regarded as the highest boon in life. And if we ascribe to God, in addition to His omnipotence and omniscience, also the attributes of goodness and love, recourse to Him produces an increased feeling of safety and happiness in the human being thirsting for solace. Against this conception not even the slightest objection can be raised from the point of natural science, for as we pointed it out before, questions of ethics are entirely outside of its realm."

"No matter where and how far we look, nowhere do we find a contradiction between religion and natural science. On the contrary, we find a complete concordance in the very points of decisive importance. Religion and natural science do not exclude each other, as many contemporaries of ours would believe or fear. They mutually supplement and condition each other. The most immediate proof of the compatibility of religion and natural science, even under the most thorough critical scrutiny, is the historical fact that the very greatest natural scientists of all times—men such as Kepler, Newton, Leibniz—were permeated by a most profound religious attitude."

"Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against scepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: "On to God!""

"I... turned to the main topic of my... work... the study of... thermodynamics."

"[T]he writings of Rudolf Clausius... through their simplicity, clarity, and... preciseness made me... dedicate myself... to the... laws of theory."

"I was interested in the concept introduced by Clausius, entropy.., (in addition to energy,) one of the most important variables of nature."

"Energy remains constant and entropy always grows and can never be reduced... [T]his is the essence of the second law of thermodynamics...the entropy of a system of bodies can... only increase."

"In the limiting case, entropy] stays the same. If it increases.., the process is irreversible. If it remains the same.., the process is reversible... [i.e.,] you can let it run backwards."

"When occurs, entropy has reached... maximum. If entropy can no longer grow.., no change can occur. This... I applied to physical-chemical and to radiation equilibria."

"In physical-chemical equilibria, an American was faster... John Willard Gibbs... Regarding radiation equilibrium... I... built the foundations."

"I did not find the entropy of heat radiation... purely theoretically in the beginning. I only found it by reference to experimental measurements... To interpret these laws... found experimentally.., I was guided by the thoughts of Ludwig Boltzmann.., who was able to interpret the entropy of a from... atomic theory, as the logarithm of the probability of the state of the gas."

"The application of Boltzmann's procedure to could only succeed if one considered radiation as atomistic.., as a combination of... quanta... of a specific size.., known... by the previous measurements."

"At first I did not like this... as it contradicted... classical atomistics, and later... thanks to... numerous colleagues, it was shown to correspond to reality."

"It took a number of years until the physics community took notice of my theory... [I]t was misunderstood by many... and... ignored..."

"Due to more precise measurements... the values of the... physical constant.., the electric elementary quantum.., were getting closer to the value... I predicted from the radiation measurements."

"I generally always turned my interest to questions which possibly lead to a simplification... of ."

"[[Quantum mechanics|[Q]uantum theory]] has not reached its full maturity... [W]e still need... generalizations.., abstractions... This is... unsatisfactory, but... also... appropriate and joyful, because we will never reach the final conclusion about nature."

"Scientific pursuit will never stop. It would be terrible if it would... If there were no more problems, one would... turn one's head off and... not work any more. Such tranquility is stagnation and... death in a scientific sense."

"[[Happiness|[H]appiness]] of the scientist lies not in possessing the truth, but in discovering..."

"No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days."

"There is no particular mystery about mathematical analysis; its only distinguishing feature is that it is more trustworthy, more precise, and permits us to proceed farther and along safer lines. Consider, for example, the well-known change of colour from red to white displayed by the light radiated through an aperture made in a heated enclosure, as the temperature increases. From this elementary fact of observation Planck, thanks to mathematical analysis, was able to deduce the existence of light quanta and thence the possibility that all processes of change were discontinuous, and that a body could only rotate with definite speeds. Obviously, commonplace reasoning unaided by mathematics would never have led us even to suspect these extraordinary results."

"Inasmuch as both Rayleigh's and Wien's laws of radiation, though incorrect, appear to express facts correctly at opposite limits of temperature and frequency, we may presume that the correct law must have an intermediary form, passing over into Rayleigh's when [temperature] T is large and [frequency] ν small, and into Wein's when the reverse situation... Planck, guided by these considerations, devised a new theory of radiation which he called the "Quantum Theory." From this theory Planck was able to derive a radiation law which satisfied Wien's relation, ...the displacement law [when the temperature is increased, intensities of all the frequencies increase, while the radiation of maximum intensity is directly proportional to the absolute temperature] and Stefan's law, and which was in excellent agreement with experimental measurements at all temperatures."

"Besides inventing quantum theory, Planck had made another great contribution to science by welcoming and generously supporting the young Albert Einstein. In 1905, when Einstein, then an unknown employee of the Swiss patent office in Bern, sent five revolutionary papers to the physics journal that Planck edited in Berlin, Planck immediately recognized them as works of genius and published them quickly without sending them to referees. He did not agree with all of Einstein’s ideas, but he published all of them. He helped Einstein to move ahead in the academic world, and in 1913 invited him to a full professorship in Berlin. For twenty years Planck and Einstein were friends and colleagues in Berlin, leaders of a scientific community that remained creative and vibrant, in spite of the political and economic disarray that surrounded them. Planck was the rock-solid central figure of German science, with the vision to promote the unorthodox and unpatriotic citizen-of-the-world Einstein."

"A man to whom it has been given to bless the world with a great creative idea has no need for the praise of posterity. His very achievement has already conferred a higher boon upon him."

"It was Planck's law of radiation that yielded the first exact determination—independent of other assumptions—of the absolute magnitudes of atoms. More than that, he showed convincingly that in addition to the atomistic structure of matter there is a kind of atomistic structure to energy, governed by the universal constant h, which was introduced by Planck. This discovery became the basis of all twentieth-century research in physics and has almost entirely conditioned its development ever since. Without this discovery it would not have been possible to establish a workable theory of molecules and atoms and the energy processes that govern their transformations. Moreover, it has shattered the whole framework of classical mechanics and electrodynamics and set science a fresh task: that of finding a new conceptual basis for all of physics."

"Max Planck says, The opposition never yields; they just die off. It’s just a question of time. They are dying off."

"It is clear, however, that the distinguishing mark of the whole development of theoretical chemistry and physics is the elimination of the anthropomorphic elements, especially specific sense-impressions, from the concepts. This process is called by Prof. M. Planck the objectification of the physical system."

"In early physical systems we have optics dealing with phenomena perceived by the eye; acoustics treating of auditory percepts, and so on. The subjective concepts of "tone" and "colour" have now been replaced by the objectified concepts of frequency of vibration; and wave-length. The object of this process of elimination is, according to Planck, the striving towards a unification of the whole theoretical system, so that it shall be equally significant for all intelligent beings."

"Planck ...devised his quanta theory, according to which the exchange of energy between the matter and the ether—or rather between ordinary matter and the small resonators whose vibrations furnish the light of incandescent matter—can take place only intermittently. A resonator can not gain energy or lose it in a continuous manner. It can not gain a fraction of a quantum; it must acquire a whole quantum or none at all."

"Planck was interested in physics, so he sought out the advice of Philipp von Jolly of the University of Munich, which he was to enter. Jolly... told Planck that "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes." ...Planck replied that he didn't wish to discover new things, only to understand what was already known in the field."

"So by December 1900 Planck had changed everything in physics and chemistry. The only problem was he didn’t realize it. [...] Although he didn’t realize it, Planck had removed a foundation stone from the edifice of classical physics; it would take another twenty-five years for the entire structure to collapse. However, the immediate reaction was ... nothing. For the next five years neither Planck nor any of the great physicists of the era took up the meaning and extension of Planck’s ideas."

"Planck had slipped the quantum of action into his not fully consistent reasoning. He had, without wholly realizing it, introduced an essential element of discreteness into the description of nature, an element alien to the theories of mechanics and electromagnetism as they then existed. To the young Einstein, however, the imperfections were all too clear... he was hit with a new paradox: Planck was deriving empirically correct equations from hypotheses that contradicted the principles of physics..."

"Many kinds of men devote themselves to science, and not all for the sake of science herself. There are some who come into her temple because it offers them the opportunity to display their particular talents. To this class of men science is a kind of sport in the practice of which they exult, just as an athlete exults in the exercise of his muscular prowess. There is another class of men who come into the temple to make an offering of their brain pulp in the hope of securing a profitable return. These men are scientists only by the chance of some circumstance which offered itself when making a choice of career. If the attending circumstances had been different, they might have become politicians or captains of business. Should an angel of God descend and drive from the temple of science all those who belong to the categories I have mentioned, I fear the temple would be nearly emptied. But a few worshipers would still remain -- some from former times and some from ours. To these latter belongs our Planck. And that is why we love him."

"The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual."

"You have driven out the kings: but have you driven out the vices that their fatal domination has bred within you?"

"poverty corrupts the People’s behaviour and degrades its soul; it predisposes it to crime"

"Citizens, imagination usually sets the limits of the possible and the impossible; but when you have the will to do good, you must have the courage to cross these limits."

"Man is born to be happy and free, and everywhere he is enslaved and unhappy! Society exists for the purpose of conserving his rights and perfecting his being, and everywhere society degrades and oppresses him! The time has come to remind him of his true destiny."

"There is one thing more despicable than a tyrant— it is a nation of slaves."

"Whoever tries to stop the saying of mass is a worse fanatic than the priest who says it."

"It is by the progress of philosophy and by the spectacle of the happiness of France, that you will extend the empire of our revolution, and not by the force of arms and by the calamities of war."

"Freedom can never be found by the use of a foreign force"

"When will the interests of governments be amalgamated with those of the people? Never!"

"Remember, that there is no more formidable enemy to liberty than fanaticism."

"Let tyranny reign a single day, and there will be no more patriots the day after. Yet one or the other has to yield."

"Every citizen fulfilling the conditions of eligibility that you have prescribed has the right to public office."

"Things have been said to you about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contrary to history. How can the persecutions they have suffered at the hands of different peoples be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate, by granting them imprescriptible human rights of which no human power could despoil them. Faults are still imputed to them, prejudices, exaggerated by the sectarian spirit and by interests. But to what can we really impute them but our own injustices? After having excluded them from all honours, even the right to public esteem, we have left them with nothing but the objects of lucrative speculation. Let us deliver them to happiness, to the homeland, to virtue, by granting them the dignity of men and citizens; let us hope that it can never be policy, whatever people say, to condemn to degradation and oppression a multitude of men who live among us. How could the social interest be based on violation of the eternal principles of justice and reason that are the foundations of every human society?"

"It is indeed a great interest, the conservation of your colonies, but even that interest is connected with your constitution; and the supreme interest of the nation and of the colonies themselves is that you conserve your liberty and do not overturn the foundations of that liberty with your own hands. Faugh! Perish your colonies, if you are keeping them at that price. Yes, if you had either to lose your colonies, or to lose your happiness, your glory, your liberty, I would repeat: perish your colonies."

"La plus extravagante idée qui puisse naître dans la tête d'un politique est de croire qu'il suffise à un peuple d'entrer à main armée chez un peuple étranger, pour lui faire adopter ses lois et sa constitution. Personne n'aime les missionnaires armés; et le premier conseil que donnent la nature et la prudence, c'est de les repousser comme des ennemis."

"Le secret de la liberté est d'éclairer les hommes, comme celui de la tyrannie est de les retenir dans l'ignorance"

"Citoyens, vouliez-vous une révolution sans révolution?"

"I know we cannot flatter ourselves that we have attained perfection; but holding up a Republic surrounded by enemies, fortifying reason in favour of liberty, destroying prejudice and nullifying individual efforts against the public interest, demand moral and physical strengths that nature has perhaps denied to those who denounce us and those we are fighting."

"The policy of the London Cabinet largely contributed to the first movement of our Revolution …Taking advantage of political tempests (the cabinet) aimed to effect in an exhausted and dismembered France a change of dynasty and to place the Duke of York on the throne of Louis XVI … Pitt … is an imbecile, whatever may be said of a reputation that has been much too greatly puffed up. A man who, abusing the influence acquired by him on an island placed haphazard in the ocean, is desirous of contending with the French people, could not have conceived of such an absurd plan elsewhere than in a madhouse."

"The aim of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to lay its foundation."

"To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that have not been spoiled by egoism and corruption… It is so sweet to devote oneself to one’s fellows that I do not know how there can be so many unfortunates still without support or defenders. As for me, my life’s task will be to help those who suffer and to pursue through my avenging speech those who take pleasure in the pain of others. How happy I will be if my feeble efforts are crowned with success and if, at the price of my devotion and sacrifices, my reputation is not tarnished by the crimes of the oppressors I will fight."

"To be armed for personal defence is the right of every man, to be armed to defend freedom and the existence of the common fatherland is the right of every citizen"

"Death, so much Death! And the wretches cast it upon me. What a memory I shall leave behind if this lasts. Life is a burden to me"

"You constantly allege the declaration of human rights, the principles of liberty, and you yourselves believed in it so little that you constitutionally decreed slavery."

"let all of Europe league against us and Europe will be defeated."

"The law, the public authority: is it not established to protect weakness against injustice and oppression? It is thus an offence to all social principles place it entirely in the hands of the rich. But the rich, the powerful, have reasoned differently, Through a strange abuse of words, they have restricted the general idea of property to certain objects only; they have called only themselves property owners: they have claimed that only property owners were worthy of the name of citizen; they have named their own particular interest the general interest, and to ensure the success of that claim, they have seized all social power."

"What is a person who, among men equal in rights, dares to declare his fellows unworthy of exercising theirs, and to take them away for his own advantage!"

"The people only ask for what is necessary, it only wants justice and tranquility, the rich aspire to everything, they want to invade and dominate everything. Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourges of the people: the interest of the people is the general interest, that of the rich is a particular interest..."

"England! Ha! What good are they to you, England and its depraved constitution, which may have looked free to you when you had sunk to the lowest degree of servitude, but which it is high time to stop praising out of ignorance or habit!"

"The National Assembly, imbued with a religious respect for the rights of men, whose maintenance should be the object of all political institutions; Convinced that a constitution designed to ensure the liberty of French people, and to influence that of the world, ought to be established on that principle above all; Declares that all Frenchmen, meaning all men born and domiciled in France, or naturalized, should enjoy fully and equally the rights of the citizen; and are eligible for all public office, without distinction other than that of their virtues and talents!"

"In every country where nature provides for the needs of men with prodigality, scarcity can only be imputed to defects of administration or of the laws themselves; bad laws and bad administration have their origins in false principles and bad morals."

"Citizens, it is you who will have the glory of making genuine principles prevail, and giving the world just laws. You are certainly not here to plod servilely along the rut of tyrannical prejudices traced by your predecessors; rather you are starting a new career in which no one has preceded you."

"What is the first object of society? It is to maintain the imprescriptible rights of man. What is the first of those rights? The right to life."

"I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, short of declaring openly that he understands this word as the right to despoil and assassinate his fellows. So how have people been able to claim that any sort of restriction, or rather any regulation of the trade in wheat, was an attack on property, and disguise that barbaric system under the specious name of freedom of trade? Do the authors of this system not perceive that they are inevitably in contradiction with themselves?"

"No doubt if all men were just and virtuous; if cupidity were never tempted to devour the people’s substance; if the rich, receptive to the voices of reason and nature, regarded themselves as the bursars of society, or as brothers to the poor, it might be possible to recognize no law but the most unlimited freedom; but if it is true that avarice can speculate on the misery and tyranny itself on the despair of the people; if it is true that all the passions declare war on suffering humanity, then why should not the law repress these abuses? Why should it not stay the homicidal hand of the monopolist, as it does that of the common murderer? Why should it not concern itself with the subsistence of the people, after caring so long for the pleasures of the great, and the power of despots?"

"The resources necessary to man are as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is a property common to all of society. Only the surplus is private property and is abandoned to the industry of merchants. Any mercantile speculation that I make at the cost of the life of my countrymen is not trade, but brigandage and fratricide."

"Je prononce à regret cette fatale vérité... mais Louis doit mourir, parce qu'il faut que la patrie vive."

"Notre révolution m'a fait sentir tout le sens de l'axiome qui dit que l'histoire est un roman ; et je suis convaincu que la fortune et l'intrigue ont fait plus de héros, que le génie et la vertu."

"Louis cannot be judged; either he is already condemned or the Republic is not acquitted. Proposing to put Louis on trial, in whatever way that could be done, would be to regress towards royal and constitutional despotism; it is a counter-revolutionary idea, for it means putting the revolution itself in contention."

"It is a gross contradiction to suppose that the constitution might preside over this new order of things; that would be to assume it had itself survived. What are the laws that replace it? Those of nature, the one which is the foundation of society itself: the salvation of the people. The right to punish the tyrant and the right to dethrone him are the same thing; both include the same forms. The tyrant’s trial is the insurrection; the verdict, the collapse of his power; the sentence, whatever the liberty of the people requires."

"A dethroned king, in the Republic, is good for only two uses: either to trouble the peace of the state and threaten liberty, or to affirm both of these at the same time."

"Les peuples ne jugent pas comme les cours judiciaires ; ils ne rendent point de sentences, ils lancent la foudre ; ils ne condamnent pas les rois, ils les replongent dans le néant : et cette justice vaut bien celle des tribunaux. Si c’est pour leur salut qu’ils s’arment contre leurs oppresseurs, comment seraient-ils tenus d’adopter un mode de les punir qui serait pour eux-mêmes un nouveau danger?"

"I utter this deadly truth with regret, but Louis must die, because the homeland has to live. Among a peaceable, free people, respected at home and abroad, you might listen to the advice being given you to be generous; but a people whose liberty is still being disputed after so many sacrifices and battles, a people in whose country the laws are still only inexorable towards the unfortunate, a people in whose country the crimes of tyranny are still subjects of dispute, such a people must want to be avenged; and the generosity for which you are being praised would resemble too much that of a society of bandits sharing out spoils."

"When a nation has been forced to resort to the right of insurrection, it returns to the state of nature in relation to the tyrant. How can the tyrant invoke the state of nature in relation to the tyrant. How can the tyrant invoke the social pact? He has annihilated it. The nation can still keep it, if it thinks fit, for everything conserving relations between citizens; but the effect of tyranny and insurrection is to break it entirely where the tyrant is concerned; it places them reciprocally in a state of war. Courts and legal proceeding are only for members of the same side."

"Aujourd’hui des hommes armés, arrivés à votre insu et contre les lois, ont fait retentir les rues de cette cité de cris séditieux, qui demandent l’impunité de Louis XVI ; aujourd’hui Paris renferme dans son sein des hommes rassemblés, vous a-t-on dit, pour l’arracher à la justice de la nation."

"XIX Dans tout état libre, la loi doit surtout défendre la liberté publique et individuelle contre l'autorité de ceux qui la gouvernent. Tout institution qui ne suppose pas le peuple bon et le magistrat corruptible est vicieuse."

"XXIX. Lorsque le gouvernement viole les droits du peuple, l'insurrection est pour le peuple et pour chaque portion du peuple, le plus sacré des droits et le plus indispensable des devoirs."

"XXXIII. Les délits des mandataires du peuple doivent être sévèrement et facilement punis. Nul n'a le droit de se prétendre plus inviolable que les autres citoyens."

"XXXV. Les hommes de tous les pays sont frères, et les différents peuples doivent s'entraider selon leur pouvoir comme les citoyens du même état."

"Mean spirits, you whose only measure of value is gold, I have no desire to touch your treasures, however impure may have been the source of them."

"I can hardly believe that it took a revolution to teach the world that extreme disparities in wealth lie at the root of many ills and crimes, but we are not the less convinced that the realization of an equality of fortunes is a visionary’s dream."

"Ask that merchant in human flesh what property is. He will tell you, pointing to the long coffin that he calls a ship and in which he has herded and shackled men who still appear to be alive: “Those are my property; I bought them at so much a head.” Question that nobleman, who has lands and ships or who thinks that the world has been turned upside down since he has had none, and he will give you a similar view of property."

"Citizens whose incomes do not exceed what is required for their subsistence are exempted from contributing to state expenditure; all others must support it progressively according to their wealth."

"By sealing our work with our blood, we may see at least the bright dawn of universal happiness. That is our ambition, that is our goal."

"We want, in a word, to fulfil nature’s wishes, to further the destinies of humanity, to keep the promises of philosophy, to absolve providence of the long reign of crime and tyranny. So that France, once illustrious among enslaved countries, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples that have existed, may become the model for all nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe."

"Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, does for itself all that it can do properly, and through delegates all that it cannot do for itself."

"Indulgence for the royalists, cry certain men, mercy for the villains! No! mercy for the innocent, mercy for the weak, mercy for the unfortunate, mercy for humanity."

"If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our homeland’s most pressing needs."

"The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny."

"We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror."

"We wish in our country that morality may be substituted for egotism, probity for false honour, principles for usages, duties for good manners, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, a contempt of vice for a contempt of misfortune, pride for insolence, magnanimity for vanity, the love of glory for the love of money, good people for good company, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for tinsel show, the attractions of happiness for the ennui of sensuality, the grandeur of man for the littleness of the great, a people magnanimous, powerful, happy, for a people amiable, frivolous and miserable; in a word, all the virtues and miracles of a Republic instead of all the vices and absurdities of a Monarchy."

"Since virtue and equality are the soul of the republic, and that your aim is to found, to consolidate the republic, it follows, that the first rule of your political conduct should be, to let all your measures tend to maintain equality and encourage virtue, for the first care of the legislator should be to strengthen the principles on which the government rests. Hence all that tends to excite a love of country, to purify manners, to exalt the mind, to direct the passions of the human heart towards the public good, you should adopt and establish."

"All that tends to... debase them into selfish egotism, to awaken an infatuation for littlenesses, and a disregard for greatness, you should reject or repress. In the system of the French revolution that which is immoral is impolitic, and what tends to corrupt is counter-revolutionary. Weaknesses, vices, prejudices are the road to monarchy. Carried away, too often perhaps, by the force of ancient habits, as well as by the innate imperfection of human nature, to false ideas and pusillanimous sentiments, we have more to fear from the excesses of weakness, than from excesses of energy."

"The warmth of zeal is not perhaps the most dangerous rock that we have to avoid; but rather that languour which ease produces and a distrust of our own courage. Therefore continually wind up the sacred spring of republican government, instead of letting it run down. I need not say that I am not here justifying any excess. Principles the most sacred may be abused: the wisdom of government should guide its operations according to circumstances, it should time its measures, choose its means; for the manner of bringing about great things is an essential part of the talent of producing them, just as wisdom is an essential attribute of virtue...."

"Happily virtue is natural in the people, [despite] aristocratical prejudices. A nation is truly corrupt, when, after having, by degrees lost its character and liberty, it slides from democracy into aristocracy or monarchy; this is the death of the political body by decrepitude...."

"But, when, by prodigious effects of courage and of reason, a whole people break asunder the fetters of despotism to make of the fragments trophies to liberty; when, by their innate vigor, they rise in a manner from the arms of death, to resume all the strength of youth when, in turns forgiving and inexorable, intrepid and docile, they can neither be checked by impregnable ramparts, nor by innumerable armies of tyrants leagued against them, and yet of themselves stop at the voice of the law; if then they do not reach the heights of their destiny it can only be the fault of those who govern."

"Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime."

"To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty. The severity of tyrants has barbarity for its principle; that of a republican government is founded on beneficence. Therefore let him beware who should dare to influence the people by that terror which is made only for their enemies! Let him beware, who, regarding the inevitable errors of civism in the same light, with the premeditated crimes of perfidiousness, or the attempts of conspirators, suffers the dangerous intriguer to escape and pursues the peaceable citizen! Death to the villain who dares abuse the sacred name of liberty or the powerful arms intended for her defence, to carry mourning or death to the patriotic heart..."

"Death is not "an eternal sleep!" Citizens! efface from the tomb that motto, graven by sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all nature a funereal crape, takes from oppressed innocence its support, and affronts the beneficent dispensation of death! Inscribe rather thereon these words: "Death is the commencement of immortality!""

"But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic."

"This egotism of non-degraded men, which finds a heavenly delight in the calmness of a pure conscience and in the ravishing spectacle of the public good, you feel it in this moment which burns in your souls; I feel it in mine."

"The confirmation of the Republic has been my object; and I know that the Republic can be established only on the eternal basis of morality."

"But how would our vile calumniators la feel it? How would the man born blind not have the idea of light? Nature has refused them a soul; they have some right to doubt, not only the immortality of the soul, but its existence."

"People, remember that, if justice doesn’t reign with absolute power in the Republic, and if this word doesn’t mean the love of equality and of the patrie, liberty is but a vain name! People, you who are feared, whom one flatters and is misunderstood; you, recognized [as] sovereign, which is always treated as a slave, remember that everywhere where justice doesn’t reign, the passions of the magistrates [do], and that the people has changed [its] shackles, and not [its] fate!"

"I leave to the oppressors of humanity a terrible testament, which I proclaim with the independence befitting one whose career is so nearly ended; it is the awful truth: “Thou shalt die!”"

"I am made to combat crime, not to govern it. The time is not here where good men can serve their patrie with impunity; the defenders of liberty will only be outcasts, as long as the horde of rogues is in control."

"My life? Oh, my life I abandon without a regret! I have seen the Past; and I foresee the Future. What friend of his country would wish to survive the moment when he could no longer serve it — when he could no longer defend innocence against oppression?"

"With this speech, I have signed my own death sentence. I saw today that the league of miscreants is too strong, that I cannot hope to escape. I die without regrets, I leave you my legacy, it will be dear to you and you will defend it."

"Only this is certain, that he remains the most hateful character in the forefront of history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men."

"He is and will be a lawyer only for the poor."

"We shall distinguish in Robespierre two men, apostle of liberty, and Robespierre the most infamous of tyrants."

"I confess today in good faith that I am angry with myself for having formerly seen in a bad light, within the revolutionary government, Robespierre and Saint-Just. I believe that these two men were better on their own than all the revolutionaries together."

"[Robespierre was] a man without personal ambition, a republican to the fingertips...would to Heaven there were in the Chamber of Deputies today someone to point to those who conspire against our freedom! We were then in the middle of a war, and we did not understand the man. He was a nervous, choleric individual who twitched when he spoke. He was a great man and posterity will not refuse him the title."

"I have the double regret — I should say the double remorse — of having overthrown Robespierre on the 9th of Thermidor and raised Bonaparte on the 13th of Vendemiaire."

"we were wrong that day [Thermidor] if someone were to ask me how [Robespierre] succeeded in taking so much ascendancy over public opinion I would answer that it was by displaying the most austere virtues, the most absolute devotion, the purest principles."

"We did not realize that in killing Robespierre, we would kill the Republic"

"No one at the time of the Revolution, went as far as Robespierre in stating what were later to be recognized as the essential conditions of the democratic state. His draft Declaration of Rights, stands out above the Revolutionary talk like a beacon. It illuminates the Revolution and it explains the greatness of Robespierre. Universal franchise, equality of rights regardless of race or religion, pay for public service to enable rich and poor alike to hold office, publicity for legislative debates, a national system of education, the use of taxation to smooth out economic inequalities, recognition of the economic responsibilities of society to the individual, the right of national autonomy, religious liberty, local self-government - such were the some of the principles for which he stood, and which are now taken for granted in democratic societies."

"The seagreen Incorruptible."

"One wonders why there are so many women who follow Robespierre to his home, to the Jacobins, to the Cordeliers and to the Convention. It is because the French Revolution is a religion and Robespierre is one of its sects. He is a priest with his flock… Robespierre preaches, Robespierre censures, he is furious, serious, melancholic and exalted with passion. He thunders against the rich and the great. He lives on little and has no physical needs. He has only one mission: to talk. And he talks all the time."

"Of no one of whom so much has been written is so little known"

"The whole corpus of Robespierre studies is a hall of mirrors"

"[Robespierre] couldn't even boil an egg."

"He is above all, a tenacious man"

"You will follow us soon! Your house will be beaten down and salt sown in the place where it stood!"

"There are two ways of totally misunderstanding Robespierre as a historical figure: one is to detest the man, the other is to make too much of him. It is absurd, of course, to see the lawyer from Arras as a monstrous usurper, the recluse as a demagogue, the moderate as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the democrat as a dictator. On the other hand, what is explained about his destiny once it is proved that he really was the Incorruptible? The misconception common to both schools arises from the fact that they attribute to the psychological traits of the man the historical role into which he was thrust by events and the language he borrowed from them. Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse."

"He was the last word of the Revolution, but nobody could read it"

"rather than thinking of Robespierre as the man who ruined the revolution, we should see him as a man that the revolution ruined."

"He was never well-informed. He had forgotten all his sterile college studies and what he picked up during his legal practice. In working for the prize essays offered by provincial academies, he had acquired some ideas which were philanthropical rather than philosophical. That was the extent of his knowledge. He never had the faintest idea about government, administration and diplomacy."

"As a judge, history also undermines the claims of leaders to omniscience. Dictators, perhaps because they know their own lies so well, have usually realized the power of history. Consequently, they have tried to rewrite, deny, or destroy the past. Robespierre in revolutionary France and Pol Pot in 1970s Cambodia each set out to start society from the beginning again. Robespierre’s new calendar and Pol Pot’s Year Zero were designed to erase the past and its suggestions that there were alternative ways of organizing society. The founder of China, the Qin Emperor, reportedly destroyed all the earlier histories, buried the scholars who might remember them, and wrote his own history. Successive dynasties were not as brutal but they, too, wrote their own histories of China’s past. Mao went one better: He tried to destroy all memories and all artifacts that, by reminding the Chinese people of the past, might prevent him from remodelling them into the new Communist men and women."

"Robespierre is certainly the most tragic subject which history offers, but also the most comic. Shakespeare has nothing like this."

"Robespierre was the first prototype for the modern European dictator: his sanctimonious vision of republican virtue and terror, and the brutal slaughter he unleashed in its name, were studied reverently by the Russian Bolsheviks and helped inspire the totalitarian mass-killings of the 20th century. Known as ‘the Sea-green Incorruptible’, his name has become a byword for the fatal purity and degenerate corruption of the ‘Reign of Terror’ which followed the French Revolution of 1789 and climaxed with the execution of King Louis XVI on 21 January 1793. The Terror illustrated not only the corrupt dangers of utopian monopolies of ‘virtue’, but how ultimately such witch hunts consume their own children."

"Some see Robespierre as one of the founding fathers of social democracy, his revolutionary excesses occasioned by his championing the cause of the people. Many more though view him as a brutal dictator who manipulated the Parisian mob for his own ends — a hypocritical despot whose terror was the precursor of the totalitarian butchery of Hitler and Stalin in modern times."

"This man will go far, because he believes everything he says."

"Robespierre was by no means the worst character who figured in the Revolution. He was a fanatic, a monster, but he was incorruptible, and incapable of robbing, or causing the deaths of others, either from personal enmity, or a desire of enriching himself. He was an enthusiast; but one who really believed that he was acting right, and died not worth a sou."

"You who supports the tottering country against the torrent of despotism and intrigue, you whom I only know, like God, through his miracles... I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not only the deputy of a province, you are one of humanity and of the Republic."

"Robespierre was quite incapable of separating the personal element from differences of opinion. That every polemical argument became in Robespierre's mouth a torrent of personal denunciation may be explained by his implicit conviction that as there is only one truth, he who disagreed with it was prompted by evil motives. But less explicable seems Robespierre's habit of declaring himself a victim of persecution, of embarking upon a dirge of self-pity and of invoking death as solace, every time he was opposed. Here we are faced with a paranoiac streak, a strange combination of a most intense and mystical sense of mission with a self-pity that expressed itself in an obsessive preoccupation with martyrdom, death and even suicide. It is the psychology of the neurotic egoist, who must impose his will—rationalized into divine truth—or wallow in an ecstasy of self-pity."

"Robespierre I find difficult to admire. It is impossible to find real greatness in him, yet, because of his passionate faith in the principles of the revolution, he was perhaps its representative man. He was never more than the outstanding speaker of Jacobinism, not the creator of Jacobin policy. He was however the only politician ever known in any country to be called by everyone 'The Incorruptible'. Perhaps this quality was more surprising in France than in some other countries. Robespierre was incorruptible over money. He was corrupted by power. He had spoken against power. He had preached democracy. When he joined the Committee of Public Safety, he abandoned his principles."

"So long as the French Revolution is regarded, not as ‘the suicide of the eighteenth century,’ but as the birth of ideas that enlighten the nineteenth, and of hopes that still inspire our own age; and so long as its leaders are sanely judged, with due allowance for the terrible difficulties of their task; so long will Robespierre, who lived and died for the Revolution, remain one of the great figures of history"

"It would be easy to say that the Jacobins were in love with power or that Robespierre established a personal dictatorship. The first statement would be partly true, the second mostly false; neither would really explain what happened."

"To hear Robespierre, he is the only defender of liberty; he is giving up for lost, he is going to quit everything; he is a man of rare modesty (laughter), and he has a perpetual refrain: "I am oppressed; they won't give me the floor"; and he is the only one with anything useful to say, for his will is always done. He says: "So-and-so conspires against me, I who am the best friend of the Republic; therefore he conspires against the Republic." That is novel."

"On voit, par cet Essai, que la théorie des probabilités n'est, au fond, que le bon sens réduit au calcul; elle fait apprécier avec exactitude ce que les esprits justes sentent par une sorte d'instinct, sans qu'ils puissent souvent s'en rendre compte."

"Said the great and magnanimous Laplace: 'It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.'"

""Les questions les plus importantes de la vie ne sont en effet, pour la plupart, que des problèmes de probabilité." Théorie analytique des probabilités, 1812."

"La dernière chose que nous attendions de vous, Général, est une leçon de géométrie !"

"Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose, ce que nous ignorons est immense."

"L'homme ne poursuit que des chimères."

"Lisez Euler, lisez Euler, c'est notre maître à tous."

"Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration."

"Il est facile de voir que..."

"It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit.But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity."

"On demandait à Laplace quel était selon lui le plus grand mathématicien de l'Allemagne. C'est Pfaff, répondit-il. - Je croyais, reprit l'interlocuteur, que Gauss lui était supérieur. - Mais, s'écria Laplace, vous me demandez quel est le plus grand mathématicien de l'Allemagne, et Gauss est le plus grand mathématicien de l'Europe."

"The most important questions of life... are indeed for the most part only problems of probability. Strictly speaking it may even be said that nearly all our knowledge is problematical; and in the small number of things which we are able to know with certainty, even in the mathematical sciences themselves, the principal means for ascertaining truth—induction and analogy—are based on probabilities."

"Imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening bounds of knowledge and disappear entirely before sound philosophy, which sees in them only the expression of our ignorance of the true causes."

"Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence. Its discoveries in mechanics and geometry, added to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the system of the world."

"All these efforts in the search for truth tend to lead it [the human mind] back continually to the vast intelligence... but from which it will always remain infinitely removed. This tendency peculiar to the human race is that which renders it superior... and their progress in this respect distinguishes nations and ages and constitutes their true glory."

"Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch... all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath."

"The theory of chance consists in reducing all the events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible, that is to say, to such as we may be equally undecided about in regard to their existence, and in determining the number of cases favorable to the event whose probability is sought."

"It is to the influence of the opinion of those whom the multitude [the populous] judges best informed, and to whom it has been accustomed to give its confidence in regard to the most important matters of life, that the propagation of those errors is due, which in times of ignorance, have covered the face of the earth. Magic and astrology offer us two great examples. These errors... having for a basis only universal credence, have maintained themselves during a very long time; but at last the progress of science has destroyed them in the minds of enlightened men, whose opinion consequently has caused them to disappear... through the power of imitation and habit which had so generally spread them... This power, the richest resource of the moral world, establishes and conserves in a whole nation ideas entirely contrary to those... elsewhere... What indulgence ought we not then to have for opinions different from ours, when this difference often depends only upon the various points of view where circumstances have placed us! Let us enlighten those whom we judge insufficiently instructed; but first let us examine critically our own opinions, and weigh with impartiality, their respective probabilities."

"Whenever I meet in La Place with the words "Thus it plainly appears," I am sure that hours, and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears."

"Laplace made many important discoveries in mathematical physics... Indeed, he was interested in anything that helped to interpret nature. He worked on hydrodynamics, the wave propagation of sound, and the tides. In the field of chemistry, his work on the liquid state of matter is classic. His studies of the tension in the surface layer of water, which accounts for the rise of liquids inside a capillary tube, and of the cohesive forces in liquids, are fundamental. Laplace and Lavoisier designed an ice calorimeter (1784) to measure heat and measured the specific heat of numerous substances; heat, to them, was still a special kind of matter. Most of Laplace's life was, however, devoted to celestial mechanics."

"Laplace created a number of new mathematical methods that were subsequently expanded into branches of mathematics, but he never cared for mathematics except as it helped him to study nature."

"This is another important dispute in the history of how we think about being wrong: whether error represents an obstacle in the path toward truth, or the path itself. The former idea is a conventional one. The latter... emerged during the Scientific Revolution and continued to evolve throughout the Enlightenment. But it didn't really reach its zenith until the early nineteenth century, when... Pierre Simon Laplace refined the distribution of errors, illustrated by the now-familiar bell curve. ...Laplace used the bell curve to determine the precise orbit of the planets. ...By using the normal distribution to graph... individually imperfect data points, Laplace was able to generate a far more precise picture of the galaxy. ...aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth."

"Laplace had taken Newton's science and turned it into philosophy. The universe was a piece of machinery, its history was predetermined, there was no room for chance or for free will. The cosmos was indeed an ice-cold clock."

"With respect to the cohesion and of liquids, I have had the good fortune to anticipate Mr. Laplace in his late researches, and I have endeavoured to show, that my assumptions are more universally applicable to the facts, than those which that justly celebrated mathematician has employed."

"[Sire,] je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse."

"The exchange is reported by Victor Hugo (who in turn was citing François Arago) as:"

"Comment, vous faites tout le système du monde, vous donnez les lois de toute la création et dans tout votre livre vous ne parlez pas une seule fois de l'existence de Dieu !"

"[Sire,] je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là."

"Lagrange, also present (or to whom Napoleon repeated Laplace's reply, in another version), then commented: "Ah ! C’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses.""

"Wikipedia recounts research about this much-cited episode."

"What the past shows, by overwhelming evidence, is that the imponderables outweigh every material article in the scales of human endeavor."

"In human affairs, all that endures is what men think."

"An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation."

"Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space."

"More and more of the flow was diverted from production into the political mechanism. Whatever elements in motion compose a stream of energy, enough must go through to complete the circuit and renew production. Water running in an aqueduct to turn a millwheel is a stream of energy; or electricity going through insulated wires; or goods in process from raw materials to finished product and conveyed by a system of transport. If the water channel is pierced with many small openings en route; or electricity taken off by more and more outlets; or the goods expropiated piecemeal at each stage of the process, finally not enough will go through for maintenance of the system. In the energy system comprised in an exchange of goods, the producers and processors have to get back enough to enable them to keep on producing and working up the raw materials and to provide transport..."

"These are not sentimental considerations; they constitute the mechanism of production and therefore of power. Personal liberty is the pre-condition of the release of energy. Private property is the inductor which initiates the flow. Real money is the transmission line; and the payment of debts comprises half the circuit. An empire is merely a long circuit energy-system. The possibility of a short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion, occurs in the hook-up of political organization to the productive processes. This is not a figure of speech or analogy, but a specific physical description of what happens."

"Men are born free, that since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior. Since volition is a function of the individual, the individual has the precedent right. Then even if it was presumed that government did equate roughly with the moral shorcomings of humanity, it should still be limited and subsidiary. If everyone were invariably honest, able, wise, and kind, there should be no occasion for government. Everyone would readily understand what is desirable and what is possible in given circumstances, all would concur upon the best means toward their purpose and for equitable participation in the ensuing benefits, and would act without compulsion or default. The maximum production was certainly obtained from such voluntary action arising from personal initiative. But since human beings will sometimes lie, shirk, break promises, fail to improve their faculties, act imprudently, seize by violence the goods of others, and even kill one another in anger or greed, the government might be defined as the police organization. In that case, it must be described as a necessary evil. It would have no existence as a separate entity, and no intrinsic authority; it could not be justly empowered to act excepting as individuals infringed one another's rights, when it should enforce prescribed penalties. Generally, it would stand in the relation of a witness to contract, holding a forfeit for the parties. As such, the least practicable measure of government must be the best. Anything beyond the minimum must be oppression."

"When the word leader, or leadership, returns to current use, it connotes a relapse into barbarism. For a civilized people, it is the most ominous word in any language."

"Whether it does any good or not, a law enforced must hurt someone."

"The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race."

"But in reason if one man has no right to command all other men--the expedient of despotism--neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing."

"The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action."

"The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others."

"But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism."

"There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure."

"A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."

"Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish."

"The moment after, I began to respire 20 quarts of unmingled nitrous oxide. A thrilling, extending from the chest to the extremities, was almost immediately produced. I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees, as the pleasurable sensations increased, I last all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorised — I imagined that I made discoveries. When I was awakened from this semi-delirious trance by Dr. Kinglake, who took the bag from my mouth, indignation and pride were the first feelings produced by the sight of the persons about me. My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime; and for a minute I walked round the room, perfectly regardless of what was said to me. As I recovered my former state of mind, I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavoured to recall the ideas, they were feeble and indistinct; one collection of terms, however, presented itself: and with the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr Kinglake, "Nothing exists but thoughts!—the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!""

"A sacred spark created by his breath, The immortal mind of man his image bears; A spirit living 'midst the forms of death, Oppressed, but not subdued, by mortal cares."

"A small piece of pure ... was placed upon an insulated disk of platina, connected with the negative side of the battery... and a platina wire communicating with the positive side, was brought into contact with the... surface of the alkali. ...The potash began to fuse at both its points of electrization. There was a violent effervescence at the upper surface; at the lower, or negative, surface, there was no liberation of elastic fluid; but small globules, having a high metallic lustre, and being precisely similar in visible characters to quicksilver, appeared, some of which burnt with explosion and bright flame, as soon as they were formed, and others remained, and were merely tarnished, and finally covered with a white film which formed on their surfaces."

"You write with great eloquence and truth on the effects of mountain scenery on the mind. Whatever exalts the imagination purifies the affections; but even our noblest and best thoughts have their archetypes in sensation. The eye is the most perfect of all the senses, and the one that most feeds the intellect. When surrounded by the grand forms of nature, we give to earth something of the indefinite character of heaven. Great objects excite great thoughts; the standard of our being rises; all our low and grovelling associations disappear; and our sympathies are more strongly awakened with regard to the moral, sublime, the excellent, the decorous, and the great in philosophy. We are more fitted to enjoy the blaze of light of Milton, to pass into the -forms of humanity with Shakespeare, and to move through the heavens with Newton. ... I am leading a truly philosophical life of activity, and the constant pursuit of an object, the elements of such a life. Such moments as I am now passing in the crowded city, prove to me how fitted our being is for independent and solitary thoughts; how much its strength depends upon its own efforts, and how little it owes to general society. Pray do not forget me, and believe me to be, very truly and affectionately, yours..."

"That the forms of natural bodies may depend upon different arrangements of the same particles of matter has been a favourite hypothesis advanced in the earliest era of physical research, and often supported by the reasonings of the ablest philosophers. This sublime chemical speculation sanctioned by the authority of Hooke, Newton, and Boscovich, must not be confounded with the ideas advanced by the alchemists concerning the convertibility of the elements into each other. The possible transmutation of metals has generally been reasoned upon not as a philosophical research, but as an empirical process. Those who have asserted the actual production of the precious metals from other elements, or their decomposition, or who have defended the chimera of the philosopher's stone, have been either impostors, or men deluded by impostors. In this age of rational inquiry it will be useless to decry the practices of the adepts, or to caution the public against confounding the hypothetical views respecting the elements founded upon distinct analogies, with the dreams of alchemical visionaries, most of whom, as an author of the last century justly observed, professed an art without principles, the beginning of which was deceit, the progress delusion, and the end poverty."

"Every new discovery may be considered as a new species of manufacture, awakening moral industry and sagacity, and employing, as it were, new capital of mind."

"Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer."

"It is surely a pure delight to know, how and by what processes this earth is clothed with verdure and life, how the clouds, mists and rain are formed, what causes all the changes of this terrestrial system of things, and by what divine laws order is preserved amidst apparent confusion. It is a sublime occupation to investigate the cause of the tempest and the volcano, and to point out their use in the economy of things, — to bring the lightning from the clouds and make it subservient to our experiments, — to produce as it were a microcosm in the laboratory of art, and to measure and weigh those invisible atoms, which, by their motions and changes according to laws impressed upon them by the Divine Intelligence, constitute the universe of things. The true chemical philosopher sees good in all the diversified forms of the external world. Whilst he investigates the operations of infinite power guided by infinite wisdom, all low prejudices, all mean superstitions disappear from his mind. He sees man an atom amidst atoms fixed upon a point in space; and yet modifying the laws that are around him by understanding them; and gaining, as it were, a kind of dominion over time, and an empire in material space, and exerting on a scale infinitely small a power seeming a sort of shadow or reflection of a creative energy, and which entitles him to the distinction of being made in the image of God and animated by a spark of the divine mind. Whilst chemical pursuits exalt the understanding, they do not depress the imagination or weaken genuine feelings; whilst they give the mind habits of accuracy, by obliging it to attend to facts, they likewise extend its analogies; and, though conversant with the minute forms of things, they have for their ultimate end the great and magnificent objects of nature. They regard the formation of a crystal, the structure of a pebble, the nature of a clay or earth; and they apply to the causes of the diversity of our mountain chains, the appearances of the winds, thunder-storms, meteors, the earthquake, the volcano, and all those phenomena which offer the most striking images to the poet and the painter. They keep alive that inextinguishable thirst after knowledge, which is one of the greatest charactics of our nature; — for every discovery opens a new field for investigation of facts, shows us the imperfection of our theories. It has justly been said, that the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded."

"I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing."

"Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer."

"Davy held that if the battery is strong enough any compound may be decomposed, and that chemical affinity is merely a form of electric attraction. He vigorously put his theory into practice..."

"Berthollet's conclusion that chlorine is oxymuriatic acid was universally accepted until Gay-Lussac and Thénard in 1809 endeavoured to decompose the gas and failed. They concluded that it contained water because it yielded water when passed over litharge. Their researches read to the Institute in 1809 led Davy to investigate muriatic acid (hydrochloric acid) gas, which in 1808 he had shown to be decomposed by potassium, with evolution of hydrogen. In 1810 he proved that chlorine is an element, and that muriatic acid gas is a compound of chlorine and hydrogen. He thus overturned the oxygen-acid theory, and demonstrated that muriates are compounds of metals with chlorine. He pointed to the fact that some acids, such as sulphuretted hydrogen, contain no oxygen, and argued that muriatic acid gas was one of these, chlorine in it taking the place of oxygen. ...The conclusions of Davy were at first doubted, but when iodine and bromine were also discovered, Gay-Lussac and his followers adopted Davy's views. The latter worked out fluorine, and proved that hydrofluoric acid (HF) contains no oxygen. Berzelius also opposed Davy until the discovery of iodine, but embraced the latter's opinion in 1820."

"Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered Sodium."

"I need only remind you of Davy's great researches: nitrous oxide; electric conduction and decomposition—resulting, on the one hand, in the separation of potassium and sodium, the decomposition of the earths following as a necessary consequence, and on the other in the electro-chemical theory; iodine and chlorine—resulting in the extension and confirmation of the word element, the discovery of the so-called hydrogen acids, and the important modification of the French theory of the constitution of acids; the investigation of gaseous explosion and of flame, and the invention of the safety lamp. These are the contributions to science which stand out more prominently in connection with Davy. But over and above all this is the peculiar manner of his discoveries. He was no patient plodder. He did not elaborate his work in minute detail. He dashed it off in broad masses; but just on that account there has never been anyone to follow up his investigations. Davy's mantle fell on no one, not even on Faraday."

"In September, 1807, our illustrious chemist applied his great principle to the analyses of potash, the vegetable alkali. Some had supposed it to consist of lime and hydrogen; others conjectured that it might contain nitrogen; and Mr Davy himself conceived that it might consist of phosphorus, or sulphur united to nitrogen. After failing with strong aqueous solutions, and also with dry potash, from its being a non-conductor, he employed fused potash, and in this case inflammable matter was separated by the voltaic influence. He then tried 'a piece of potash moistened, and in this instance inflammable matter was developed.' On the 6th of October he found that the matter instantly burned when it touched water, and swam on its surface, reproducing potash.' In dry oxygen gas likewise it burnt into 'perfectly dry potash.' In like manner, Mr Davy succeeded in decomposing soda; and when he had thus proved that the two fixed alkalis were metallic oxides, he immediately supposed that the earths, which were so much more like to metallic oxides than the fixed alkalis, would be easily decomposed."

"The delight which Mr Davy experienced when he first saw the minute globules of ' (the new metal) burst through the crust of potash, and take fire as they entered the atmosphere, was witnessed by his relative and assistant Mr . 'He could not contain his joy—he actually danced about the room in ecstatic delight, and some little time was required for him to compose himself sufficiently to continue the experiment.'"

"These grand discoveries, which some ascribed to the 'enormous batteries which were placed in his hands,' were the result of his intellectual powers, not of fortuitous circumstances. His voltaic battery was within the reach of many of the chemists of Europe; and consisted, in fact, of three different batteries united, one of 24 plates of copper and zinc, 12 inches square, another of 100 plates of 6 inches, and another of 150 plates of 4 inches."

"While he was recording these splendid discoveries in his second Bakerian lecture, Mr Davy was thrown into a state of fever, and laboured under the deepest apprehension that he would die before he had finished his paper. This state of his mind was the prelude to a severe and long-protracted disease, which his friend and physician Dr Babington considered as the result of over-fatigue and excitement from his experimental labours and discoveries. During five weeks 'he struggled between life and death,' and it was not till the end of nine weeks that his convalescence commenced. The anxious enquiries of all ranks exhibited the personal regard which he commanded, and the public importance which was attached to his recovery."

"It was fortunate for science that Mr Davy survived this severe malady without any injury to his constitution, or any diminution of his mental powers. He resumed his enquiries with his wonted ardour, and by the liberality of the managers and principal members of the Royal Institution, he was furnished with the means of pursuing them with success. During his convalescence, a voltaic battery of 600 double plates, each four inches square, was constructed and placed at his disposal; and not long afterwards, when a more powerful apparatus was thought desirable, the munificence of a few individuals supplied him with another battery of no less than 2000 plates. This powerful artillery was now directed against the earths; but the task of these analyses was more difficult than he expected."

"I breakfasted this morning with Sir Humphry Davy, of whom we have heard so much in America. He is now about thirty—three, but with all the freshness and bloom of five-and-twenty, and one of the handsomest men I have seen in England. He has a great deal of vivacity,—talks rapidly, though with great precision, and is so much interested in conversation, that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience, and keeps him in constant motion."

"He has just returned from Italy, and delights to talk of it,—thinks it, next to England, the finest country in the world, and the society of Rome surpassed only by that of London, and says he should not die contented without going there again."

"It seemed singular that his taste in this should be so acute, when his professional eminence is in a province so different and remote; but I was much more surprised when I found that the first chemist of his time was a professed angler; and that he thinks, if he were obliged to renounce fishing or philosophy, that he should find the struggle of his choice pretty severe."

"After breakfast Sir Humphry took me to the , where he used to lecture before he married a woman of fortune and fashion, and where he still goes every day to perform chemical experiments for purposes of research. He showed me the library and model-room, his own laboratory and famous galvanic troughs, and at two o'clock took me to a lecture there, by Sir James Smith, on botany,—very good and very dull."

"The publication of Davy's discovery created an extrordinary sensation throughout the civilised world, a sensation not less profound, and certainly more general from its very nature, than that which attended his lecture of the previous year. But at the very moment of his triumph, it seemed that the noise of the universal acclaim with which it was received was not to reach him."

"Almost immediately after the delivery of his lecture he collapsed, struck down by an illness which nearly proved fatal, and for weeks his life hung on a thread. He had been in a low feverish condition for some time previously, and a great dread had fallen upon him that he should die before he had completed his discoveries. It was in this condition of body and mind that he had applied himself to the task of putting together an account of his results."

"Four days after this was given to the world he took to his bed, and he remained there for nine weeks. Such a blow following hard on the heels of such a triumph aroused the liveliest sympathy. The doors of the Royal Institution were beset by anxious inquirers, and written reports of his condition at various periods of the day had to be posted in the hall."

"The strength of the feeling may be gleaned, too, from the sentences with which the Rev. Dr. Dibdin, who... began the lecture introductory to the Session of 1808."...If it had pleased Providence to deprive the world of all further benefit from his original talents and intense application, there has certainly been sufficient already effected by him to entitle him to be classed among the brightest scientific luminaries of his country. ...These may justly be placed among the most brilliant and valuable discoveries which have ever been made in chemistry, for a great chasm in the chemical system has been filled up; a blaze of light has been diffused over that part which before was utterly dark; and new views have been opened, so numerous and interesting, that the more any man who is versed in chemistry reflects on them, the more he finds to admire and heighten his expectation of future important results. Mr. Davy's name, in consequence of these discoveries, will be always recorded in the annals of science amongst those of the most illustrious philosophers of his time. His country... will be proud of him, and it is no small honour to the that these great discoveries have been made within its walls—in that laboratory, and by those instruments... placed at the disposal and for the use of its most excellent professor of chemistry.""

"Have and at all justified the hope that they would facilitate the means of procuring the comforts and conveniences of life? I have not the time... to attempt to follow the many changes in the metallurgy of the metals of the alkalis of the past century. Let me... show how the matter stands at the end of a hundred years."

"The general properties and chemical activities of potassium and sodium are so very similar that as a matter of commercial production that metal which can be most economically obtained is necessarily the one most largely manufactured, and of the two that metal is sodium. To-day, sodium is made by thousands of tons, and by a process which in principle is identical with that by which it was first made by Davy, i.e., by the of fused caustic soda."

"[A]fter a series of revolutions in its manufacture, sodium, having been produced from time to time on a manufacturing scale by a variety of metallurgical methods involving purely thermal processes of reduction and distillation, entirely dissociated from electricity, we should have now got back to the very principle of the process which first brought the metal to light. And that this has been industrially possible is entirely owing to another of Davy's discoveries - possibly indeed the greatest of them all—Michael Faraday."

"As we all gratefully acknowledge, it is to the genius and labours of Faraday—Davy's successor in this place—that the astonishing development of the application of electrical energy which characterises this age has taken rise."

"The modern method of production of sodium is based, therefore, as regards principles upon the conjoint labours of Davy and Faraday. ...These principles took their present form of application at the hands of... Hamilton Y. Castner... It is by Castner's process that all the sodium of to-day is manufactured."

"The greater quantity of the sodium made in England is... converted into ... for use in the extraction of gold. As gold is... generally considered the principal material factor in procuring the comforts and conveniences of life, Davy's great discovery may be thus said to have secured the primary object which the projectors of the Royal Institution had in view. Other important uses of sodium are in the manufacture of peroxide for bleaching purposes, of artificial , and of a number of other synthetic dye stuffs and of drugs like antipyrin."

"I am indebted to the directors of the Castner-Kellner Company... or affording me the opportunity, in connection with this lecture, of actually witnessing the modern process of manufacturing sodium as it is carried out at ... And in concluding may I be permitted to recall here the feelings to which that visit to Wallsend gave rise. ...Before me, stretching down to the river, was the factory where a score of workers, clad in helmets and gauntlets and swathed like so many Knights Templar, travel-stained and war-worn, their visages lit up by the yellow soda flames, and their ears half-deafened with the sound of exploding —a veritable inferno—were repeating on a Gargantuan scale the little experiment first made a century ago in the cellars of this building; turning out, day and night, hundredweights of the plastic metal in place of the little pin-heads which then burst upon the astonished and delighted gaze of Davy."

"Behind me was the magnificent power-house... furnishing not only the electrical energy which transformed the soda into sodium, but diffusing this energy for a multitude of other purposes over an entire district—a noble temple to the genius and prescience of Faraday. Surely one might here say, if you desire to see the monuments of these men, look around!"

"A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?"

"I can say this. I believe that the human mind, or even the mind of a cat, is more interesting in its complexity than an entire galaxy if it is devoid of life."

"Mathematical magic combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick."

"The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity."

"There are, and always have been, destructive pseudo-scientific notions linked to race and religion; these are the most widespread and damaging. Hopefully, educated people can succeed in shedding light into these areas of prejudice and ignorance, for as Voltaire once said: "Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities.""

"In many cases a dull proof can be supplemented by a geometric analogue so simple and beautiful that the truth of a theorem is almost seen at a glance."

"Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all."

"I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph.D. I said I didn't have one and he looked startled. "You mean you're in the same racket I am," he said, "you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?" That's really what I do."

"There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry."

"Ever since I was a boy, I've been fascinated by crazy science and such things as perpetual motion machines and logical paradoxes. I've always enjoyed keeping up with those ideas. I suppose I didn't get into it seriously until I wrote my first book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I was influenced by the Dianetics movement, now called Scientology, which was then promoted by John Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction. I was astonished at how rapidly the thing had become a cult."

"As I have often said, electrons and gerbils don't cheat. People do."

"Ideologues of all persuasions think they know how the economy will respond to the Administration's strange mixture of Lafferism and monetarism. Indeed, their self-confidence is so vast, and their ability to rationalize so crafty, that one cannot imagine a scenario for the next few years, that they would regard as falsifying their dogma. The failure of any prediction can always be blamed on quirky political decisions or unforeseen historical events."

"The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse."

"Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine—in fact one shudders to imagine—a child of today reading and enjoying it."

"Debunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle. One takes comfort from the fact there is no Gresham's laws in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad."

"Bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society. We see this happening now in the rapid rise of the religious right and how it has taken over large segments of the Republican Party."

"We know from polls how ignorant the general public is about science. Almost half of all adults in the United States now believe in astrology and in angels and demons, and that we are being observed by aliens and UFOs who frequently abduct humans. More than half believe that evolution is an unverified a theory. Science education in our nation, especially in lower grades, is getting worse, not better. Several states are constantly doing their best to force public schools to teach creationism. Greedy publishers, interested only in profit, turn out book after book on astrology, ufology, the occult, dangerous programs to lose weight without exercising or cutting calories, and every known variety of dubious medicine. The electronic media are equal offenders. Every year I hope the tide is about to turn, and that contributors to television, radio, and the Internet will become so appalled by the flood of fake science they keep flinging at the public that they will at least try to tone it down. Alas, every year the flood gets worse."

"Suppose, however, there is not enough time for measures to be taken to prevent a collision, and earth is shattered by a giant NEO that will hurt us all into oblivion. What are the philosophical implications of such an event? This obviously is not a problem for atheists, agnostics, or pantheists because they are resigned to the fact that nature does not care a rap about preserving a species. What about theists? I’m inclined to think that even to them a certain extinction of humanity would be acceptable. The Biblical Jehovah, remember, is said to have drowned every man, woman, baby, and their pets, except for Noah and his family. If God can allow an earthquake to kill thousands, or the Black Death to wipe out half of Europe, surely she would have no scruples about allowing an asteroid to bring human history to a flaming end."

"Let the Bible be the Bible! It’s not about science. It’s not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting."

"The King James Bible is a literary masterpiece best left unaltered. It is a classic to put on a shelf alongside the great fantasies of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and yes, even the Koran."

"For reasons that reflect popular ignorance of science, combined with a love of miracles, the notion that fresh eggs balance more easily on the first day of spring caught fire in the United States."

"Public infatuation with alternative medicines of all varieties shows no sign of abating. Acupuncture, homeopathy, aromatherapy, herbal remedies, chelation, iridology, therapeutic touch, magnet therapy, psychic healing, and so on are gaining new converts every day. The tragedies occur, of course, when gullible sufferers rely solely on such remedies and avoid seeking mainstream help. It would be good if we had some statistical evidence about the frequency of deaths following reliance on pseudomedicines."

"My attack on Freud brought a raft of angry letters from dedicated Freudians. One reader assured me that Freudianism is “alive and well.” True, but alive and well only among a dwindling remnant of Freud acolytes, not among the majority of today’s psychiatrists or intellectuals."

"This confusion of the certainty of mathematics within a formal system and the uncertainty of its applications to the world is a common mistake often made by ignorant sociologists."

"The deeper question that lies behind the above banalities is whether the rules of baseball are similar to or radically different from the rules of science. Clearly they are radically different. Like the rules of chess and bridge, the rules of baseball are made by humans. But the rules of science are not. They are discovered by observation, reasoning, and experiment. Newton didn’t invent his laws of gravity except in the obvious sense that he thought of them and wrote them down. Biologists didn’t “construct” the DNA helix; they observed it. The orbit of Mars is not a social construction. Einstein did not make up E=mc2 the way game rules are made up. To see rules of science as similar to baseball rules, traffic rules, or fashions in dress is to make a false analogy that leads nowhere."

"But that science moves inexorably closer to finding objective truth can only be denied by peculiar philosophers, naive literary critics, and misguided social scientists. The fantastic success of science in explaining and predicting, above all in making incredible advances in technology, is proof that scientists are steadily learning more and more about how the universe behaves."

"The curious notion that “truth” does not mean “correspondence with reality,” but nothing more than the successful passing of tests for truth, was dealt a death blow by Alfred Tarski’s famous semantic definition of truth: “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. The definition goes back to Aristotle. Most philosophers of the past, all scientists, and all ordinary people accept this definition of what they mean when they say some thing is true. It is denied only by a small minority of pragmatists who still buy John Dewey’s obsolete epistemology."

"Carlos Castaneda died in Westwood, California, in 1998. “His only real sorcery,” writes Kathryn Lindskoog in her entertaining book Fakes, Frauds, and Other Malarkey (1993), “was turning the University of California into an ass.” The next time you come close to a crow, try calling out “Hello Carlos!” If you are high enough on peyote, you might hear the bird answer."

"Although Jacobs has had no training in psychology, psychiatry, or hypnotherapy, he uses hypnotism to induce his patients (now more than seven hundred) to develop strong memories of horrendous abductions even though many patients had no such memories until hypnotized. Jacobs is convinced that five million Americans have been kidnapped at least once by aliens. One female patient, who worked in retail sales, had, according to Jacobs, one hundred abductions in one year, an average of one every three days!"

"To support his conviction that the Old Testament is accurate history, Newton worked out an elaborate chronology of earth’s history, drawing on astronomical data such as eclipses and star motions and legends such as that of Jason and the Argonauts, which he took to be genuine events. With incredible ingenuity he tried to harmonize biblical history with secular histories of the ancient world. It is sad to envision the discoveries in mathematics and physics Newton might have made if his great intellect had not been diverted by such bizarre speculations."

"His "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American is one of the few bridges over C. P. Snow's famous "gulf of mutual incomprehension" that lies between technical and literary cultures."

"He writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"Gardner is the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us."

"He was not a mathematician—he never even took a maths class after high school—yet Martin Gardner, who has died aged 95, was arguably the most influential and inspirational figure in mathematics in the second half of the last century."

"Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species."

"The smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable, though less so when it has newly fallen from the tree; for the moment it is ripe it falls of itself, and the only way to eat Durians in perfection is to get them as they fall. It would perhaps not be correct to say that the Durian is the best of all fruits, because it cannot supply the place of subacid juicy fruits such as the orange, grape, mango, and mangosteen, whose refreshing and cooling qualities are so grateful; but as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed. If I had to fix on two only as representing the perfection of the two classes, I should certainly choose the Durian and the Orange as the king and queen of fruits."

"The powerful retractile talons of the falcon- and the cat-tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; but among the different varieties which occurred in the earlier and less highly organized forms of these groups, those always survived longest which had the greatest facilities for seizing their prey. Neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for the purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them. [...] We believe we have now shown that there is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type - a progression to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits - and that the same principle which produces this result in a state of nature will also explain why domestic varieties have a tendency to revert to the original type. This progression, by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit."

"I think I have fairly heard and fairly weighed the evidence on both sides, and I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths [...] I can see much to admire in all religions [...] But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth."

"On the question of the "origin of species" Mr. Haughton enlarges considerably; but his chief arguments are reduced to the setting-up of "three unwarrantable assumptions," which he imputes to the Lamarckians and Darwinians, and then, to use his own words, "brings to the ground like a child's house of cards." The first of these is "the indefinite variation of species continuously in the one direction." Now this is certainly never assumed by Mr. Darwin, whose argument is mainly grounded on the fact that variations occur in every direction. This is so obvious that it hardly needs insisting on. In every large family there is almost always one child taller, one darker, one thinner than the rest; one will have a larger nose, another a larger eye: they vary morally as well; some are more poetical, others more morose; one has a genius for numbers, another for painting. It is the same in animals: the puppies, or kittens, or rabbits of one litter differ in many ways from each other - in colour, in size, in disposition; so that, though they do not "vary continuously in one direction," they do vary continuously in many directions; and thus there is always material for natural selection to act upon in some direction that may be advantageous. [...] I will only, in conclusion, quote from it a short paragraph which contains an important truth, but which may very fairly be applied in other quarters than those for which the author intended it: - "No progress in natural science is possible as long as men will take their rude guesses at truth for facts, and substitute the fancies of their imagination for the sober rules of reasoning.""

"I have carefully measured the proboscis of a specimen of [Neococytius] cluentius from South America in the collection of the British Museum, and find it to be nine inches and a quarter long! One from tropical Africa ([Xanthopan] morganii) is seven inches and a half. A species having a proboscis two or three inches longer could reach the nectar in the largest flowers of Angræcum sesquipedale, whose nectaries vary in length from ten to fourteen inches. That such a moth exists in Madagascar may be safely predicted; and naturalists who visit that island should search for it with as much confidence as astronomers searched for the planet Neptune - and they will be equally successful!"

"In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes."

"He [the naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past."

"While upon the subject of plants I may here mention a few of the more striking vegetable productions of Borneo. The wonderful Pitcher-plants, forming the genus Nepenthes of botanists, here reach their greatest development. Every mountain-top abounds with them, running along the ground, or climbing over shrubs and stunted trees; their elegant pitchers hanging in every direction. Some of these are long and slender, resembling in form the beautiful Philippine lace-sponge (Euplectella), which has now become so common; others are broad and short. Their colours are green, variously tinted and mottled with red or purple. The finest yet known were obtained on the summit of Kini-balou, in North-west Borneo. One of the broad sort, Nepenthes rajah, will hold two quarts of water in its pitcher. Another, Nepenthes Edwardsiania, has a narrow pitcher twenty inches long; while the plant itself grows to a length of twenty feet."

"I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected."

"We permit absolute possession of the soil of our country, with no legal rights of existence on the soil to the vast majority who do not possess it. A great landholder may legally convert his whole property into a forest or a hunting-ground, and expel every human being who has hitherto lived upon it. In a thickly-populated country like England, where every acre has its owner and its occupier, this is a power of legally destroying his fellow-creatures; and that such a power should exist, and be exercised by individuals, in however small a degree, indicates that, as regards true social science, we are still in a state of barbarism."

"'We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared,' Darwin's rival Alfred Russel Wallace observed in 1876."

"If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for."

"ἀλλ᾽οἱ βροτοὶ δοκέουσι γεννᾶσθαι θεοὺς, τὴν σφετέρην δ᾽ἐσθῆτα ἔχειν φωνήν τε δέμας τε."

"ἀλλ᾽ εἰ χεῖρας ἔχον βόες <ἵπποι τ᾽> ἠὲ λέοντες ἢ γράψαι χείρεσσι καὶ ἔργα τελεῖν ἅπερ ἄνδρες, ἵπποι μέν θ᾽ ἵπποισι βόες δέ τε βουσὶν ὁμοίας καί <κε> θεῶν ἰδέας ἔγραφον καὶ σώματ᾽ ἐποίουν τοιαῦθ᾽ οἷόν περ καὐτοὶ δέμας εἶχον <ἕκαστοι>."

"Αἰθίοπές τε <θεοὺς σφετέρους> σιμοὺς μέλανάς τε Θρῇκἐς τε γλαυκοὺς καὶ πυρρούς <φασι πέλεσθαι>."

"There is one god, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought."

"For all things are from the earth and to the earth all things come in the end."

"Human law must rest its authority ultimately upon the authority of that law which is divine. Far from being rivals or enemies religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistance. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other."

"We have viewed, in a number of instances, the accommodating spirit of the common law. In other instances, its temper is decided and firm. The means are varied according to times and circumstances; but the great ends of liberty are kept steadily and constantly in view. Its foundations were laid in remote antiquity, have not been overturned by the successive invasions, or migrations, or revolutions which have taken place. The reason has already been hinted at: it contains the common dictates of nature, refined by wisdom and experience, as occasions offer, and cases arise. In all sciences, says my Lord Bacon, they are the soundest that keep closest to particulars. Indeed a science appears to be best formed into a system, by a number of instances drawn from observation and experience, and reduced gradually into general rules; still subject, however, to successive improvements, which future observation or experience may suggest to be proper. The natural progress of the human mind, in the acquisition of knowledge, is from particular facts to general principles. This progress is familiar to all in the business of life; it is the only one, by which real discoveries have been made in philosophy; and it is the one, which has directed and superintended the instauration of the common law. In this view, common law, like natural philosophy, when properly studied, is a science founded on experiment. The latter is improved and established by carefully and wisely attending to the phenomena of the material world; the former, by attending, in the same manner, to those of man and society. Hence, in both, the most regular and undeviating principles will be found, on accurate investigation, to guide and control the most diversified and disjointed appearances. How steadily and how effectually has the spirit of liberty animated the common law, in all the vicissitudes, revolutions, and dangers, to which that system has been exposed! In matters of a civil nature, that system works itself pure by rules drawn from the fountain of justice : in matters of a political nature, it works itself pure by rules drawn from the fountain of freedom."

"The executive power is better to be trusted when it has no screen. Sir, we have a responsibility in the person of our President; he cannot act improperly, and hide either his negligence or inattention; he cannot roll upon any other person the weight of his criminality; no appointment can take place without his nomination; and he is responsible for every nomination he makes... far from being above the laws, he is amenable to them in his private character as a citizen, and in his public character by impeachment."

"To the Constitution of the United States the term SOVEREIGN, is totally unknown."

"Man, fearfully and wonderfully made, is the workmanship of his all perfect Creator: A State; useful and valuable as the contrivance is, is the inferior contrivance of man; and from his native dignity derives all its acquired importance."

"Let a state be considered as subordinate to the people: But let everything else be subordinate to the state."

"By a State I mean, a complete body of free persons united together for their common benefit, to enjoy peaceably what is their own, and to do justice to others."

"Through certain humors or passions, and from temper merely, a man may be completely miserable, let his outward circumstances be ever so fortunate."

"'Twas the saying of [Georgias Leontinus apud Arist. Rhetor. lib. 3. cap. 18… which the Translator renders, Seria Risu, Risum Seriis discutere] an ancient sage that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit."

"Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance."

"How comes it to pass then, that we appear such Cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the Test of Ridicule?"

"Gravity is of the very Essence of Imposture. It does not only make us mistake other Things, but is apt perpetually almost to mistake it-self."

"We may have an excellent Ear in Musick, without being able to perform in any kind. We may judg well of Poetry, without being Poets, or possessing the least of a Poetick Vein: But we can have no tolerable Notion of Goodness, without being tolerably good."

"Truth, 'tis suppos'd, may bear all Lights: and one of those principal Lights or natural Mediums, by which Things are to be view'd, in order to a thorow Recognition, is Ridicule it-self, or that Manner of Proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just Raillery in any Subject."

"All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Mens Understandings."

"True courage…has so little to do with Anger, that there lies always the strongest Suspicion against it, where this Passion is highest. The true Courage is the cool and calm. The bravest of Men have the least of a brutal bullying Insolence; and in the very time of Danger are found the most serene, pleasant, and free. Rage, we know, can make a Coward forget himself and fight. But what is done in Fury, or Anger, can never be plac’d to the account of Courage."

"The most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and Moral Truth. For all Beauty is Truth. True Features make the Beauty of a Face; and true Proportions the Beauty of Architecture; as true Measures that of Harmony and Musick."

"'Tis the hardest thing in the world to be a good Thinker, without being a strong Self-Examiner."

"Never did any Soul do good, but it came readier to do the same again, with more Enjoyment. Never was Love, or Gratitude, or Bounty practis'd but with increasing Joy, which made the Practiser still more in love with the fair Act."

"Truly … as accidental as my Life may be, or as that random Humour is, which governs it; I know nothing, after all, so real or substantial as My-Self. Therefore if there be that Thing you call a Substance, I take for granted I am one. But for anything further relating to this Question, you know my Sceptick Principles: I determine neither way."

"'Tis not Wit merely, but a Temper which must form the Well-Bred Man. In the same manner, 'tis not a Head merely, but a Heart and Resolution which must compleat the real Philosopher."

"The Taste of Beauty, and the Relish of what is decent, just, and amiable, perfects the Character of the Gentleman, and the Philosopher. And the Study of such a Taste or Relish will, as we suppose, be ever the great Employment and Concern of him, who covets as well to be wise and good, as agreeable and polite."

"A Right Mind, and Generous Affection, [has] more Beauty and Charm, than all other Symmetrys in the World besides."

"I agree with you, that he was a Man of Erudition, and a very polite Writer; he has display'd a copious Imagination, and a fine Turn of thinking, in courtly Language and nervous Expressions: But as, on the one hand, it must be confess'd, that his Sentiments on Liberty and Humanity are noble and sublime, and that there is nothing trite or vulgar in the Characteristicks; so, on the other, it cannot be denied, that the Ideas he had form'd of the Goodness and Excellency of our Nature, were as romantick and chimerical as they are beautiful and amiable; that he labour'd hard to unite two Contraries that can never be reconcil'd together, Innocence of Manners and worldly Greatness; that to compass this End he favour'd Deism, and, under Pretence of lashing Priestcraft and Superstition, attack'd the Bible it self; and lastly, that by ridiculing many Passages of Holy Writ, he seems to have endeavour'd to sap the Foundation of all reveal'd Religion, with Design of establishing Heathen Virtue on the Ruins of Christianity."

"Men of acute mind call me an ascetic, but they are wrong in their diagnosis. Although I disciplined my desires, I only abandoned worldly pleasures because the best of these withdrew themselves from me."

"Sometimes you may find a man skillful in his trade, perfect in sagacity and in the use of arguments, but when he comes to religion he is found obstinate, so does he follow in the old groove. Piety is implanted into human nature; it is deemed a sure refuge. To the growing child, that which falls from his mother's lips is a lesson that abides with him all his life. Monks in their cloisters and devotees in their mosques accept their creed just as a story is handed down from him who tells it, without distinguishing between a true interpreter and a false. If one of these had found his kin among the Magians, or among the Sabians, he would have become nearly or quite like them."

"Some worse people than I have entered Paradise! But it is not everybody’s fortune to be granted forgiveness, it is like wealth in the Fleeting World."

"Whenever I reflect, my reflecting upon what I suffer only rouses me to blame him that begot me. And I gave peace to my children, for they are in the bliss of non-existence which surpasses all the pleasures of this world. Had they come to life, they would have endured a misery casting them to destruction in trackless wildernesses."

"We laugh, but inept is our laughter; We should weep and weep sore, Who are shattered like glass, and thereafter Re-moulded no more!"

"Methink I am thrice-imprisoned—ask not me Of news that need no telling— By loss of sight, confinement in my house, And this vile body for my spirit’s dwelling."

"The holy fights by Moslem heroes fought, The saintly works by Christian hermits wrought And those of Jewry or of Sabian creed— Their valour reaches not the Indian's deed Whom zeal and awe religiously inspire To cast his body on the flaming pyre."

"They know me well. How could they conceal a resplendent sun?"

"And I, albeit I come in Time's late hour, Achieve what lay not in the ancients' power."

"Fear of death pushed Seven Sleepers into a cave, Made Noah and his son build a ship; Nor did Moses and Adam think it pleasant to die Though they were promised paradise."

"ولو أنّي حُبِيتُ الخُلْدَ فَرْداً لمَا أحبَبْتُ بالخُلْدِ انفِرادا فلا هَطَلَتْ عَلَيّ ولا بأرْضي سَحائبُ ليسَ تنْتَظِمُ البِلادا"

"اِثْنَانِ أَهْلُ الْأَرْضِ ذُو عَقْلٍ بِلَا دِينٍ وَآخَرُ دَيِّنٌ لَا عَقْلَ لَهُ"

"Do not unjustly eat what the water has given up, and do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals, Or the white (milk) of mothers who intended its pure draught for their young, not for noble ladies. And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking their eggs; for injustice is the worst of crimes. And spare the honey which the bees get betimes by their industry from the flowers of fragrant plants; For they did not store it that it might belong to others, nor did they gather it for bounty and gifts. I washed my hands of all this; and would that I had perceived my way ere my temples grew hoar!"

"This world is such an abode that if those present here Have their wits entire, they will never weep for the absent ones."

"How sad that I returned, how sad, Instead of dying at Baghdad! I say, whene'er things fall amiss, "My coming home hath brought me this.""

"They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth. Then perish the fools who forged the (religious) traditions or interpreted them!"

"A little doubt is better than total credulity."

"Abu'l-Ala is a poet many centuries ahead of his time."

"His poems generally known as the Luzumiyat arrest attention by their boldness and originality as well as by the sombre and earnest tone which pervades them."

"If I had but a garden for a bower Wherein the roses of Damascus flower, How happy, with the Luzumiyat in hand, To pass the afternoon and sunset hour!"

"His asceticism, his deep sense of right and wrong, his powerful intellect, his prodigious memory, and his wide range of learning, are alike acknowledged by both friend and foe."

"History shows that many freethinkers, not daring to express their thoughts freely, have sheltered themselves behind a religion in which they disbelieved. Such was Euripides, and such was Ma'arri. In the works of both we find three elements:"

"In the emerging picture of mankind in the universe, the future (if it exists) will surely entail discoveries about space and time which will open up whole new perspectives in the relationship between mankind, mind, and the uni-verse.… But what is now? There is no such thing in physics;it is not even clear that ‘now’ could ever be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics.… Notions such as ‘the past,’ ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ seem to be more linguistic than physical.… There is no universal now, but only a personal one—a ‘here and now.’ This strongly suggests that we look to the mind, rather than to the physical world, as the origin of the division of time into past, present, and future.…There is none of this in physics.… No physical experiment has ever been performed to detect the passage of time. As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost into the night."

"Science, it is usually believed, helps us to build a picture of objective reality – the world 'out there'. With the advent of the quantum theory, that very reality appears to have crumbled, to be replaced by something so revolutionary and bizarre that its consequences have not yet been properly faced."

"All this prompts the question of why, from the infinite rage of possible values that Nature could have selected for the fundamental constants, and from the infinite variety of initial conditions that could have characterized the primeval universe, the actual values and conditions conspire to produce the particular range of special features that we observe. For clearly the universe is a very special place: exceedingly uniform on a large scale, yet not so precisely uniform that galaxies could not form; extremely low entropy per proton, and hence cool enough for chemistry to happen; almost zero cosmic propulsion and an expansion rate tuned to that energy content to unbelievable accuracy; values for the strengths of its forces that permit nuclei to exist, yet do not burn up all the cosmic hydrogen, and many more apparent accidents of fortune."

"The brain is the medium of expression of the human mind. Similarly the entire physical universe would be the medium of expression of the mind of a natural God."

"That the universe has organized its own self-awareness – is for me powerful evidence that there is 'something going on' behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence."

"Matter as such has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity and information."

"The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown."

"What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"..."

"Human beings have always been struck by the complex harmony and intricate organization of the physical world. The march of the heavenly bodies across the sky, the rhythms of the seasons, the pattern of a snowflake, the myriads of living creatures so well adapted to their environment – all these things seem too well arranged to be a mindless accident."

"I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate."

"In each and every one of us lies a message. It is inscribed in an ancient code, its beginnings lost in the mists of time. Decrypted, the message contains instructions on how to make a human being. Nobody wrote the message; nobody invented the code. They came into existence spontaneously. Their designer was Mother Nature herself, working only within the scope of her immutable laws and capitalizing on the vagaries of chance.The message isn't written in ink or type, but in atoms, strung together in an elaborately arranged sequence to form DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid. It is the most extraordinary molecule on Earth."

"The laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind. To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way."

"To a physicist like me, life looks to be little short of magic: all those dumb molecules conspiring to achieve such clever things!"

"The thing that separates life from non-life is information."

"Seventy-five years ago Erwin Schrödinger published... '... the key point... was whether life can be explained by physics. ...Schrödinger ...said "We must be prepared to find a new kind of physical law prevailing...""

"[W]e... need some new physics. ...The attempt to square the circle by starting out with known physics at the atomic level and somehow life emerging at some higher level... I... don't think we're going to be able to do it without new physics."

"[[Max Delbrück|[M]ax Delbrück]]... expressed it... (to encapsulate)... [A]t the level of atoms it's just known physics, but at the level of the living cell it's some sort of magic."

"We lack any sort of device that can... detect life. We don't have a life meter. ...We don't have a general purpose life meter that can detect life as we don't know it."

"The fundamental problem about trying to define life... If you go to a physics department... you'll be given a definition in terms of matter... force... energy... entropy... free energy, molecular binding affinities, and so on. If you go to a biology department... you'll be given a very different narrative in terms of... instructions, transcription, , translation, coding, signals..."

"[B]iologists... define life in terms of its informational qualities... physicists tend to define life in terms of the physical qualities."

"[[Information theory|[I]nformation]] pervades biology. Your DNA is chock full of encrypted information, and the encryption is really important. But s don't act in isolation. They couple together to form networks, sometimes of great complexity, and information swirls around these networks. It can be stored.... processed... and it can have knock-on effects... beyond individual cells. Even bacteria can signal each other chemically... electrically and mechanically, and so, through physical forces, can exchange information and engage in cooperative behavior, like in s."

"[A]nts... have... collective decision-making... a labyrinth of [network] information exchange... which can profoundly affect the outcome of the colony. We see it... in bird flocking."

"Perhaps the most exquisite example of information in biology... During embryogenesis there's the most meticulous choreography of organized information, so all the right bits end up in the right place, at the right time. ...[T]he power of information to sculpt [living] physical forms."

"[T]hat great information processing system between our ears... probably ...the grandest example we know of... in the universe."

"This web of information extends beyond individual organisms and communities of organisms to a planetary scale. ...Andrew Kim and Harrison Smith... looked at over 28,000 genomes and... produced this... plot of information being organized on a... planetary scale. ...[T]he biosphere was the original ."

"Paul Nurse ...in his visionary essay ..."Life, Logic and Information" extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying... about... the molecular level, we should think of life as being a collection of logic modules... with information flowing between them... control systems... [an] engineering approach."

"[W]ith the physics of living matter, have we joined... the world of physics with the world of informational biology?"

"[[Information theory|[I]nformation]]... has been in physics for a long time, in the most obvious way with Maxwell's demon... It was... just a Gedanken-Experiment... in 1867, but just in recent years, engineers (nanotechnologists) have built real Maxwell demons, and this is now something of a cottage industry."

"[[Maxwell's demon|[T]he demon]]... is transferring heat from a colder region to a warmer region in apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. ...[A] refrigerator... costs energy to run... but the demon is operating using information instead... The demon... runs without any energy expenditure."

"So in effect, information serves as a fuel, and this leads to the whole concept of information engines. Engines that will run on information power..."

"Life was onto this... billions of years ago. Life uses many many nano-molecules... in effect, Maxwell demons. Our bodies are full of [them]... doing the business of life. ...not quite perfect ...but they're coming pretty close to the theoretical limit, in terms of energy expenditure."

"s are the way in which... you are thinking and paying attention, because the signals that travel between neurons, down the s, are controlled by the flow of s across the membranes of the axons... [T]hey are, in effect, little demons that sense the incoming signal and open and close the gates; and the ions flow. ...[T]his is so incredibly energy efficient that ...your brain, which is like a megawatt supercomputer, operates with the energy equivalent of a small light bulb."

"It's now commonplace to have an informational term entering into the fundamental laws of physics as a source of free energy."

"Information in life... amounts to much more than just playing the margins of the , and gaining some... energy advantage. ...I'm calling this a demonic cut. It's much more than just Shannon s at the thermodynamic level. Biological information is... contextual, or functional, or semantic. It depends upon the overall system."

"[A] is a set of instructions for ribosome to make a protein. If you look at the DNA sequence that codes for a gene, there's nothing that can tell you, at the sequence level, that if you look at a particular , that this is a bit of functional or coding or contextual information, and it's not just junk."

"[T]his is something that can't be defined locally. It's got to be defined globally, in the context of the system as a whole. ...[T]hat's a very difficult thing for physicists to cope with because we're used to formulating all our laws of physics as local laws, and not as global laws."

"I'm using this term demonic cut by analogy with the Cartesian cut..."

"[A]t what point does information, in the physics of matter, cease to just be a thermodynamic issue, and become much more of a control issue? ...[O]ne place ...is the . ...[H]ow did this come into existence?"

"If ever you want an example of going from physics to biology, it's the origin of the ."

"[T]here is... not just [some] new physical law, but a new kind of physical law. ...[W]hat kind of physical law? ...[O]ne idea that Sarah Walker and I have flirted with is state-dependent laws of information. ...[T]ake chess as an analogy ...If you had a modified game of chess in which the rules ...could be updated according to the state of play ...this opens the way to new forms of complexity and new forms of configuration."

"We want to know the transition zone between this demonic cut... from just Shannon] bits of information... to this more complex form of global, or contextual, or functional information. ...[H]azarding some guesses ...it might be a transition that would be measured by the integrated information, or... pathway complexity that Lee Cronin toyed with, or the breakdown of unitarity, if you think that this is associated in some way with the quantum classical transition."

"[C]osmological limits of agency... [W]hat's the best that the universe can do? There's about... 10100k bits of free energy out there. What could be achieved? ... [Egyptian pyramids have] been achieved... Maybe... astro-engineering... [T]ake a galaxy that's rotating clockwise and make it rotate anti-clockwise? ...I suspect ...maybe yes. ...[T]urn the expanding universe into a contracting universe? ...I'm sure the answer is no."

"I know of no theorem that tells you... the maximum amount of change that agency can achieve in the universe, and what interests me... is agency at the end of the universe. If you end up in , which has a temperature and a horizon entropy, can you do anything with... those thermal fluctuations? Can you mine them... to extract energy?"

"[[w:Particle detector|[P]article detectors]] in De Sitter space respond as if they are immersed in a bath of thermal radiation. However, the stress energy momentum tensor in De Sitter space is not that of thermal radiation. It's just a renormalization of the cosmological constant. So there's something a bit funny about the thermal nature of De Sitter space, and I've been interested in whether you can mine that thermal stuff..."

"[I]f you have a Maxwell demon or something like a Szilard engine in , could you use it, as Maxwell envisaged, to use information to extract energy from De Sitter space and... do... useful work? ...[Perhaps] only if you can create a region of the De Sitter space that is screened out from that horizon... from that thermal nature. If you put a reflective barrier around the demon, you then have De Sitter space, but with the horizon screened out. ...[T]hat's a problem I'm working on now ..."

"We are justified in drawing an absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and taught."

"Each person has his religion and sect impressed upon him as a child, merely as a prejudice, through memorized formulas that are not understood and a drilled-in fear of damnation."

"Jesus left us nothing in writing; everything that we know of his teaching and deeds is contained in the writings of his disciples. Especially where his teaching is concerned, not only the evangelists among his disciples, but the apostles as well undertook to present their master's teaching. However, I find great cause to separate completely what the apostles say in their own writings from that which Jesus himself actually said and taught, for the apostles were themselves teachers and consequently present their own views."

"[Jesus] was born a Jew and intended to remain one."

"[It is] evident that Jesus in no way intended to abolish this Jewish religion and introduce a new one in its place. From this it follows inevitably that the apostles taught and acted exactly the reverse of what their master had intended, taught, and commanded..."

"The apostles strayed completely from their master in their teaching and in their lives, abandoning his religion and his intention and introducing a completely new system."

"[Jesus' Jewish contemporaries] are still thinking in terms of a temporal redemption and of an earthly kingdom that they had hoped from Jesus up until that time. Israel or the Jewish people was to be redeemed, but not the human race... Thus it was not a savior of the human race who would expiate the sins of the whole world through his Passion and death, but one who would redeem the people of Israel from temporal servitude."

"It is foolish to sigh and complain about mankind's disbelief if one cannot furnish men with the persuasive evidence that the matter demands, based on a healthy reason."

"That which is absurd and impossible, that which in any other history would be called falsehood, deception, outrage and cruelty, cannot be made reasonable, righteous, and true by the added words: "Thus saith the Lord.""

"[Jesus] ended his life with the words, "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?" "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"—a confession which can hardly be otherwise interpreted than that God had not helped him to carry out his intention and attain his object as he had hoped He would have done. It was then clearly not the intention or the object of Jesus to suffer and to die, but to build up a worldly kingdom, and to deliver the Israelites from bondage. It was in this that God had forsaken him, it was in this that his hopes had been frustrated."

"Thus the existing history of Jesus enlightens us more and more upon the object of his conduct and teaching, which entirely correspond with the first idea entertained of him by his apostles, i.e., that he was a worldly deliverer. It enlightens us also upon the fact that they had good reason to believe in him as such so long as he lived. It also shows that the master, and how much more his disciples found themselves mistaken and deceived by the condemnation and the death, and that the new system of a suffering spiritual Saviour, which no one had ever known or thought of before, was invented after the death of Jesus, and invented only because the first hopes had failed."

"The essential parts of Christianity are the articles of faith by the denial or ignorance of which we cease to be Christians. The principal of these are: the spiritual deliverance through the suffering and death of Christ; Resurrection from death in confirmation of the sufficient suffering of Christ; and, the return of Christ for reward and punishment, as the fruit and consequence of the deliverance. He who grapples with or disproves these first principles attacks the substance (or essence) of the object."

"By unessential things in reference to religion I mean first of all, the miracles, to which nevertheless such particular importance is attached by the Christian religion. No one can affirm that miracles of themselves establish a single article of faith. If we granted that articles of faith carried with them conviction and inherent credibility, how should we dare to require miracles in order to believe them? If we granted that the resurrection had been proved to be true by the most undoubted and unanimous witnesses, as in all fairness it ought to be, we could surely believe it without any assistant miracle. If we granted that Christ really did return in the clouds of Heaven, as according to promise he ought to have done, we should certainly want no miracles to prove it."

"Jesus himself could not perform miracles where the people had not faith beforehand, and when sensible men, the learned and rulers of those times, demanded of him a miracle which could be submitted to examination, he, instead of granting the request, began to upbraid them; so that no man of this stamp could believe in him. It was not until thirty to sixty years after the death of Jesus, that people began to write an account of the performance of these miracles, in a language which the Jews in Palestine did not understand. And this was at a time when the Jewish nation was in a state of the greatest disquietude and confusion, and when very few of those who had known Jesus were still alive. Nothing then was easier for them than to invent as many miracles as they pleased, without fear of their writings being readily understood or refuted. It had been impressed upon all converts from the beginning that it was both advantageous and soul-saving to believe, and to put the mind captive under the obedience of faith; and consequently there was as much credulity among them as there was "pia fraud" or "deception from good motives" among their teachers; and both of these, as is well known, prevailed in the highest degree in the early Christian church."

"Other religions, indeed, are quite as full of miracles; the heathen boasts of many, so does the Turk; no religion is without them, and this it is which also makes the Christian miracles so doubtful, and provokes us to ask: "Did the events really happen? Were the attendant circumstances such as are stated? Did they come to pass naturally, or by craft, or by chance?"... those who would build Christianity upon miracles give it nothing firm, deep or substantial for a foundation."

"It is always a sign that a doctrine or history possesses no depth of authenticity when one is obliged to resort to miracles in order to prove its truth. Miracles do not possess in or by themselves any principle containing a single article of faith or conclusive fact. It follows not because a prophet has performed miracles that therefore he has spoken the truth, because false prophets and magicians also performed signs and wonders, and false Christs performed miracles by which even the elect might be deceived. It follows not because Jesus restored sight to a blind man and healed a lame one, ergo God is threefold in person, ergo Jesus is a real God and man. It follows not because Jesus awakened Lazarus from death that therefore he also must have arisen from death."

"The unerring signs of truth and falsehood are clear, distinct consistency and contradiction. This is also the case with revelation, in so far as that it must, in common with other truths, be free from contradiction. And just as little as miracles can prove that twice two are five or that a triangle has four angles, can a contradiction lying in the history and dogmas of Christianity be removed by any number of miracles."

"If a prophecy is to be called infallible, I fairly demand that it should state beforehand legibly, clearly, and distinctly that which no man could previously have known, and that the same should thereafter take place at the time appointed, but that it should not take place because it has been predicted. If, however, such a prophecy can only be verified through allegorical interpretations of words and interpretation of words and things; if it be only composed of dark and dubious words, and the expressions it contains are commonplace, vague, and uncertain; if the matter was thought probable, or was foreseen by human cunning; if it occurs because it was predicted; if the words used refer to some other matter and are only applied to the prophecy by a quibble; if it is only written down after the event has occurred; if a prophetic book or passage is given out to be older than it is; or lastly, if the thing predicted does not take place at all, then the prophecy is either doubtful or false."

"In short, I may affirm that one cannot refer to a single quoted prophecy that is not false; or if you would have me speak more mildly, I will only say that they are all ambiguous and doubtful, and are not to be accepted from writers who trifle with things and words."

"H. S. Reimarus, whose work was published posthumously in 1778, was the first to develop a picture of Jesus distinct from the Christ described in the Gospels."

"Before Reimarus, no one had attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus."

"To say that the fragment on "The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples" is a magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a masterpiece of general literature. The language is as a rule crisp and terse, pointed and epigrammatic—the language of a man who is not "engaged in literary composition" but is wholly concerned with the facts. At times, however, it rises to heights of passionate feeling, and then it is as though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty a scorn; but then it is seldom that a work has been written in the just consciousness of so absolute a superiority to contemporary opinion. And withal, there is dignity and serious purpose; Reimarus' work is no pamphlet."

"His work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological."

"He had no predecessors; neither had he any disciples. His work is one of those supremely great works which pass and leave no trace, because they are before their time..."

"The first thing that struck him, and the first conclusion he came to, was that the Bible is not a book of religious instruction or a catechism."

"Reimarus had too much sense of truth to endeavour to explain away by artificial demonstration the punishment of eternal Hell fire. If salvation was alone to be found in the name of Jesus, if all who did not believe in him were to be everlastingly damned, and as this creed must have been handed down from the sayings of Jesus himself, it followed that ninety-nine hundredths of the human race, those who either had never heard of Christ or of salvation to be obtained through him, or those who had not been able to convince themselves of it, were unmercifully sentenced, after this short life, to everlasting torment; and this not for the sake of making them better, but to punish them, and to satisfy God's unquenchable wrath, for a sin committed in the beginning of Creation, and a sin of which they themselves were guiltless. This seemed to banish all Divine perfection, all that was lovable and noble in God, and transformed Him into the likeness of a Satanic and hideous demon."

"The idea of God, as the most perfect of beings, existed full and warm in the heart of Reimarus, as we see by the following words:—"Far be it from Thee, great Judge of the World, most lovable, most kind, most charitable, most merciful God, to pronounce so unjust a sentence upon the poor creatures Thou hast created!""

"Nature, in providing us with combustibles on all sides, has given us the power to produce, at all times and in all places, heat and the impelling power which is the result of it. To develop this power, to appropriate it to our uses, is the object of heat-engines."

"Iron and heat are... the supporters, the bases, of the mechanic arts."

"To take away to-day from England her steam-engines would be to take away at the same time her coal and iron. It would be to dry up all her sources of wealth, to ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short, to annihilate that colossal power."

"Steam navigation... tends to unite the nations of the earth as inhahitants of one country. ...is not this the same as greatly to shorten distances?"

"There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel."

"Savery, Newcomen, Smeaton, the famous Watt, Woolf, Trevithick, and some other English engineers, are the veritable creators of the steam-engine."

"Notwithstanding the work of all kinds done by steam-engines... their theory is very little understood, and the attempts to improve them are still directed almost by chance."

"The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered from a sufficiently general point of view. We have considered it only in machines... [for which] the phenomenon is... incomplete. It becomes difficult to recognize its principles and study its laws. ...[T]he principle of the production of motion by heat... must be considered independently of any mechanism or... particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam-engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated."

"We shall have [a complete theory] only when the laws of Physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known beforehand all the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body."

"The production of motion in steam-engines is always accompanied by... the re-establishing of equilibrium in the caloric; that is, its passage from a body in which the temperature is more or less elevated, to another in which it is lower."

"What happens... in a steam-engine... ? The caloric developed in the furnace by the effect of the combustion traverses the walls of the boiler, produces steam, and in some way incorporates itself with it. The latter carrying it away, takes it first into the cylinder, where it performs some function, and from thence into the condenser, where it is liquefied by contact with the cold water... [T]he cold water of the condenser takes possession of the caloric... It is heated by the intervention of the steam as if it had been placed directly over the furnace. The steam is here only a means of transporting the caloric."

"[W]e have just described the re-establishment of equilibrium in the caloric, its passage from a... heated body to a cooler one."

"The production of motive power is then due... not to an actual consumption of caloric, but to its transportation from a warm body to a cold body... to its re-establishment of equilibrium..."

"[T]he production of heat alone is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power: it is necessary that there should also be cold; without it, the heat would be useless."

"[I]f we should find about us only bodies as hot as our furnaces, how can we condense steam? What should we do with it if once produced?"

"Wherever there exists a difference of temperature... it is possible to have also the production of impelling power. ...All substances in nature can be employed for this purpose, all are susceptible of changes of volume, of successive contractions and dilatations, through the alternation of heat and cold. All are capable of overcoming in their changes of volume certain resistances... A solid... A liquid... An aeriform fluid... If it is enclosed in an expansible space, such as a cylinder provided with a piston, it will produce movements of great extent. Vapors of all substances capable of passing into a gaseous condition, as of , of mercury, of , etc., may fulfil the same office as vapor of water. ...Most of these... have been proposed, many even have been tried, although... without remarkable success."

"Heat can evidently be a cause of motion only by virtue of the changes of volume or of form which it produces in bodies."

"The maximum of motive power resulting from the employment of steam is also the maximum of motive power realizable by any means whatever.1878"

"[W]hen a body has experienced any changes, and when after a certain number of transformations it returns to precisely its original state, that is, to that state considered in respect to density, to temperature, to mode of aggregation—let us suppose, I say, that this body is found to contain the same quantity of heat that it contained at first, or else that the quantities of heat absorbed or set free in these different transformations are exactly compensated. This fact has never been called in question. It was first admitted without reflection, and verified afterwards in many cases by experiments with the . To deny it would be to overthrow the whole theory of heat to which it serves as a basis. For the rest, we may say in passing, the main principles on which the theory of heat rests require the most careful examination. Many experimental facts appear almost inexplicable in the present state of this theory."

"Plan in the morning the work of the day, and reflect in the evening on what has been done."

"Carry when walking a book, and a note-book to preserve the ideas, and a piece of bread in order to prolong the walk if need be."

"Vary the mental and bodily exercises with dancing, horsemanship, swimming, fencing with sword and with sabre, shooting with gun and pistol, skating, the sling, stilts, tennis, bowls; hop on one foot, cross the arms, jump high and far, turn on one foot propped against the wall, exercise in shirt in the evening to get up a perspiration before going to bed; turning, joinery, gardening, reading while walking, declamation, singing, violin, versification, musical composition; eight hours of sleep; a walk on awakening, before and after eating; great sobriety; eat slowly, little, and often; avoid idleness and useless meditation."

"Adopt good habits when I change my method of life."

"Never turn to the past unless to enlighten the future. Regrets are useless."

"Form resolutions in advance in order not to reflect during action. Then obey thyself blindly."

"The promptitude of resolutions most frequently accords with their justice."

"Yield frequently to the first inspiration. Too much meditation on the same subject ends by suggesting the worst part, or at least causes loss of precious time."

"Suffer slight disagreeables without seeming to perceive them, but repulse decisively any one who evidently intends to injure or humiliate you."

"One should never feign a character that he has not, or affect a character that he cannot sustain."

"Self-possession without self-sufficiency. Courage without effrontery."

"Make intimate acquaintances only with much circumspection; perfect confidence in those who have been thoroughly tested. Nothing to do with others."

"Question thyself to learn what will please others."

"No useless discourse. All conversation which does not serve to enlighten ourselves or others, to interest the heart or amuse the mind, is hurtful."

"Speak little of what you know, and not at all of what you do not know."

"Speak to every one of that which he knows best. This will put him at his ease, and be profitable to you."

"Abstain from all pleasantry which could wound."

"Employ only expressions of the most perfect propriety."

"Listen attentively to your interlocutor, and so prepare him to listen in the same way to your reply, and predispose him in favor of your arguments."

"Show neither passion nor weariness in discussion."

"Never direct an argument against any one. If you know some particulars against your adversary, you have a right to make him aware of it to keep him under control, but proceed with discretion, and do not wound him before others."

"When discussion degenerates into dispute, be silent; this is not to declare yourself beaten."

"How much modesty adds to merit! A man of talent who conceals his knowledge is like a branch bending under a weight of fruit."

"Why try to be witty? I would rather be thought stupid and modest than witty and pretentious."

"Men desire nothing so much as to make themselves envied."

"Egotism is the most common and most hated of all vices. Properly speaking, it is the only one which should be hated."

"The pleasures of self-love are the only ones that can really be turned into ridicule."

"I do not know why these two expressions, good sense and common sense, are confounded. There is nothing less common than good sense."

"The strain of suffering causes the mind to decay."

"It must be that all honest people are in the galleys; only knaves are to be met with elsewhere."

"I rejoice for all the misfortunes which might have happened to me, and which I have escaped."

"Life is a short enough passage. I am half the journey. I will complete the remainder as I can."

"Hope being the greatest of all blessings, it is necessary, in order to be happy, to sacrifice the present to the future."

"Let us not be exacting; perfection is so rare. Indulgence! Indulgence!"

"The more nearly an object approaches perfection, the more we notice its slightest defects."

"To neglect the opportunity of an innocent pleasure is a loss to ourselves."

"Recherché pleasures cause simple pleasures to lose all their attractions."

"It may sometimes be necessary to yield the right, but how is one to recover it when wanted?"

"Love is almost the only passion that the good man may avow. It is the only one which accords with delicacy."

"Do nothing that all the world may not know."

"The truly wise man is he who loves virtue for its own sake."

"We say that man is an egotist, and nevertheless his sweetest pleasures come to him through others. He only tastes them on condition of sharing them."

"If one could continually satisfy his desires, he would never have time to desire. Happiness then is necessarily composed of alternatives. It could not exist at a constant level."

"To each conqueror can be said, when he has ceased tormenting our poor globe, "Would you not have been able to tilt equally well against a little globe of pasteboard?""

"The laws of war, do they say? As if war were not the destruction of all laws."

"War has been represented as necessary to prevent the too rapid increase of the population, but war mows down the flower of the young men, while it spares the men disgraced by nature. Hence it tends to the degeneration of the species."

"The decadence of the Greeks and Romans... proves the influence of institutions upon customs."

"According to the system of modern economists, it would be desirable that the government should interfere as little as possible in the commerce and industry of the country. Nevertheless we cannot deny that in certain circumstances this intervention is very useful."

"Taxes are regarded by economists as an evil, but as a necessary evil, since they provide for public expenses. Consequently, economists think that if the government possessed sufficient revenues, in domains for example, the suppression of all taxes would be a desirable measure."

"Taxes are a means of influencing production and commerce to give to them a direction which they would not naturally have taken. Such an influence may undoubtedly have disagreeable consequences if the taxes are imposed without discrimination or exclusively for a fiscal purpose, but it is entirely otherwise if wisdom and tact preside at their institution."

"Men attribute to chance those events of the causes of which they are ignorant. If they succeed in divining these causes, chance disappears. To say that a thing has happened by chance, is to say that we have not been able to foresee it. I do not myself believe that any other acceptation can be given to this word. What to an ignorant man is chance, cannot be chance to one better instructed."

"If human reason is incapable of discovering the mysteries of Divinity, why has not Divinity made human reason more clear-sighted?"

"God cannot punish man for not believing when he could so easily have enlightened and convinced him."

"If God is absolutely good, why should He punish the sinner for all eternity, since He does not lead him to good, or give him an example?"

"According to the doctrine of the church, God resembles a proposing enigmas, and devouring those who cannot guess them."

"The church attributes to God all human passions—anger, desire for vengeance, curiosity, tyranny, partiality, idleness."

"If Christianity were pruned of all which is not Christ, this religion would be the simplest in the world."

"What motives have influenced the writers who have rejected all religious systems? Is it the conviction that the ideas which they oppose are all injurious to society? Have they not rather included in the same proscription religion and the abuse of it?"

"The belief in an all-powerful Being, who loves us and watches over us, gives to the mind great strength to endure misfortune."

"A religion suited to the soul and preached by men worthy of respect would exercise the most salutary influence upon society and customs."

"[C]hanges caused in the temperature of bodies by motion have been very little studied. This class of phenomena merits... attention... When bodies are in motion, especially when that motion disappears, or when it produces motive power, remarkable changes take place in the distribution of heat, and perhaps in its quantity."

"The Collision of Bodies. ...[I]n the collision of bodies there is always expenditure of motive power. Perfectly elastic bodies only form an exception, and none such are found in nature."

"[A]lways in the collision of bodies there occurs... an elevation of temperature. We cannot, as did M. Berthollet, attribute the heat set free in this case to the reduction of the volume of the body..."

"It would seem... that heat set free should be attributed to the friction of the molecules of the metal, which change place relatively to each other, that is, the heat is set free just where the moving force is expended. ...We may also cite... the heat produced by the extension of a metallic rod just before it breaks... the greater the elongation before rupture, the more considerable is the elevation of temperature."

"When a hypothesis no longer suffices to explain phenomena, it should be abandoned. This is the case with... caloric as matter, as a subtile fluid. The experimental facts tending to destroy this theory are as follows: (1) The development of heat by percussion or the friction of bodies (experiments of Rumford, friction of wheels on... axles...). Here the elevation of temperature takes place at the same time in the body rubbing and the body rubbed. ...Thus heat is produced by motion. If... [caloric] is matter... matter is created by motion. (2) ...[A]ir compressed by the pumps must rise in temperature above the air outside, and it is expelled at a higher temperature. ...Thus heat has been created by motion."

"[[Light|[L]ight]] is generally regarded as the result of a vibratory movement of the ethereal fluid. Light produces heat, or at least accompanies the radiating heat, and moves with the same velocity as heat. Radiating heat is then a vibratory movement. It would be ridiculous to suppose that it is an emission of matter while the light which accompanies it could be only a movement."

"Could a motion (that of radiating heat) produce matter (caloric)? No, undoubtedly; it can only produce a motion. Heat is then the result of a motion. Then it is plain that it could be produced by the consumption of motive power, and that it could produce this power."

"Is heat the result of a vibratory motion of molecules? If... so, quantity of heat is simply quantity of motive power. As long as motive power is employed to produce vibratory movements, the quantity of heat must be unchangeable... but when it passes into movements of sensible extent, the quantity of heat can no longer remain constant."

"Liquuefaction of bodies, solidification of liquids, crystallization—are they not forms of combinations of integrant molecules?"

"[T]here cannot be loss of living force, or, which is the same thing, of motive power, if the bodies act upon each other without directly touching each other, without actual collision. ...[T]he molecules of bodies are always separated from each other by some space ...they are never actually in contact. If they touched each other, they would remain united, and consequently change form. If the molecules of bodies are never in close contact with each other, whatever... forces... separate or attract them, there can never be either production or loss of motive power... This power must be as unchangeable in quantity as matter."

"Heat is simply motive power, or rather motion which has changed form. It is a movement among the particles of bodies. Wherever there is destruction of motive power there is, at the same time, production of heat in quantity exactly proportional to the quantity of motive power destroyed. Reciprocally, wherever there is destruction of heat, there is production of motive power."

"[[Energy|[M]otive power]] is, in quantity, invariable in nature; that it is, correctly speaking, never either produced or destroyed. It is true that it changes form, that is, it produces sometimes one sort of motion, sometimes another, but it is never annihilated."

"Carnot's work, Sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu, is the first in which any attempt is made to explain the production of work from heat. It is unfortunately marred by his assumption, that heat is a material substance, though it is only fair to say that he expresses grave doubts as to the truth of this hypothesis. ...He begins his investigation by premising the following correct principle, sadly neglected by many subsequent writers: 'If a body, after having experienced a certain number of transformations, be brought identically to its primitive state as to density, temperature, and molecular constitution, it must contain the same quantity of heat as that which it initially possessed.' Hence he concludes, that when heat produces work, it is in consequence of its being let down from a hot body to a cold one, as from the boiler to the condenser of a steam-engine. His investigation... forms the foundation of the modern theory."

"In the nineteenth century Sadi Carnot combined the old idea that perpetual-motion machines are impossible (an early and incomplete version of the first law) with the (heat is a substance) to prove that in a heat engine a discharge of heat to the cold surroundings was inevitable. From this starting point, he and others deduced some remarkable conclusions about the efficiency of heat engines and about the properties of matter..."

"Carnot considered that the steam engine was analogous to another prime mover, the water wheel. The analogy, and the upon which it was based, led Carnot to the incorrect conclusion that no heat was lost, or converted into mechanical energy during the operation of the steam engine. He thought that the same quantity of heat was given out by the boiler at the higher temperature as was received by the condenser at the lower temperature. However, the analogy led him also to the fruitful conception that the amount of energy produced... was solely dependent, in principle, upon the temperature difference between the boiler and the condenser and the amount of heat which passed from the one to the other. Thus it appeared that all heat engines in general, would have the same efficiency if they worked within the same temperature levels. He substantiated this... Carnot's principle, by pointing out that would be possible if it were not true. If two perfect heat engines operating between the same temperature levels did not have the same efficiency, it would be possible for the more efficient... to drive the less efficient engine backwards, pumping heat from the lower to the higher temperature, thus leaving the thermal conditions unchanged and yet generating a continuous excess of energy."

"Later, in 1830, Carnot appreciated that his comparison of... the waterwheel was not exact, and that some heat was converted into mechanical energy... Thereupon he abandoned the and adopted the view that heat was... motions of the particles of bodies, heat and mechanical energy being interconvertible... Carnot died... 1832, and his later views... were not published until 1878."

"Nicolas-Leonard-Sadi Carnot was, perhaps, the greatest genius, in the department of physical science at least, that this century has produced. ...his one little volume, which has made him immortal, was written when he was but twenty-three or twenty-four."

"One could... safely declare that 'Physics... can be defined as that subject which treats of the transformation of energy.' The philosophical version of Herakleitos and Empedokles... a continual cycle of changes and exchanges, had... crystallized into a quantitative physical theory. But this... picture... was... incomplete. For... there was a second, equally general and fundamental element in Nature—a directional one. This had first been formulated in the 1820s by the Mozart of modern physics, Sadi Carnot. ...Carnot started with the question: What proportion of the heat in any system is 'available' as a means of producing mechanical energy? ...Carnot demonstrated ...a one-hundred-per-cent-efficient engine could exploit only a fraction of the heat supplied to it... A 'super-efficient' machine which could exploit all the heat supplied, would be (as Carnot's mathematics proved) a machine... one could get out of it more energy than was supplied... In an ... physical changes could at most be perfectly reversible; [but] in normal cases they would result in the progressive... 'degradation' of mechanical energy by the production of unavailable heat. To characterize this... Clausius coined the word ... [T]he directional principle of Carnot and Clausias (which gave precise expression to Newton's insight that 'motion is more easily lost than got, and is continually upon the decrease') became the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

"On January 16, 1793, the in Paris sentenced to death. Among those who took the fatal decision was... Lazare Carnot... [who] had a passion for the great Persian poet Saadi Shirazi... Carnot names his first son after Saadi. Sadi Carnot is thus born out of poetry and rebellion. As a young man, he develops a passion for those steam engines... beginning to transform the world... In 1824, he writes... "," in which he seeks to understand the theoretical basis of... these machines. The little treatise is packed with mistaken assumptions: he imagines that heat is a concrete entity... fluid that produces energy by "falling" from hot things to cold, just as... a waterfall... But it contains a key idea: that steam engines function... because the heat passes from hot to cold."

"Science and technology are inseparable, in two senses. First, because and understanding of the laws of the universe is always implicit in technology. (Francis Bacon said, "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.") Second, because, beyond a certain level in technology, the understanding tends to become explicit. Arguably the most profound scientific truth is the second law of thermodynamics, which notes the inexorability of universal chaos and thus... defines the current against which organic evolution and cultural evolution both swim. The earliest statement of the second law came in the nineteenth century from the Frenchman Sadi Carnot, who described himself as a "constructor of steam engines," the vocation that indeed had led him to see the gist of the second law."

"The whole theory rests on a principle generally admitted as an axiom, which Carnot expresses in the following terms:— "In our demonstration, we tacitly assume that after a body has experienced a certain number of transformations, if it be brought identically to its primitive physical state as to density, temperature, and molecular constitution, it must contain the same quantity of heat as that which it initially possessed; or, in other words, we suppose that the quantities of heat lost by the body under one set of operations, are precisely compensated by those which are absorbed in the others. This fact has never been doubted; it has at first been admitted without reflection, and afterwards verified in many cases by calorimetrical experiments. To deny it would be to overturn the whole theory of heat, of which it is a fundamental principle. It must be admitted, however, that the chief foundations on which the theory of heat rests would require a most attentive examination. Several experimental facts appear nearly inexplicable in the actual state of this theory." Since the time when Carnot thus expressed himself, the necessity of a most careful examination of the entire experimental basis of the theory of heat has become more and more urgent. Especially all those assumptions depending on the idea that heat is a substance invariable in quantity, not convertible into any other element, and incapable of being generated by any physical agency..."

"In the present state of science... no operation is known by which heat can be absorbed into a body, without either elevating its temperature or becoming latent, and producing some alteration in its physical condition; and the fundamental axiom adopted by Carnot may be considered as still the most probable basis for an investigation of the motive power of heat; although this, and with it every other branch of the theory of heat, may ultimately require to be reconstructed on another foundation, when our experimental data are more complete. On this understanding the author of the present paper refers to Carnot's fundamental principle, as if its truth were thoroughly established."

"If we consider any case in which mechanical effect is obtained from a thermal origin, by means of the alternate expansions and contractions of any substance whatever, and follow a perfectly rigorous process of reasoning indicated by Carnot, we arrive at the following conclusion... The thermal agency by which mechanical effect may be obtained, is the transference of heat from one body to another at a lower temperature."

"The criterion of what may be called a perfect thermo-dynamic engine is thus stated: A perfect thermo-dynamic engine is such, that, whatever amount of mechanical effect it can derive from a given thermal agency, if an equal amount be spent in working it backwards, an equal reverse thermal effect will be produced. Any two perfect engines, however different in their constructions, or in the physical media employed, must derive the same equivalent of mechanical effect from a given thermal agency. Carnot describes a steam-engine and an air-engine, each of which satisfies the criterion laid down above (the construction being however in each case, practically impossible); and he shews how, with certain physical data, with reference to steam in one case, and with reference to air or any gas in the other, the equivalent of mechanical effect, derivable from a given thermal agency, may be calculated."

"For a considerable portion of the present century, Davy's discoveries about heat were neglected, or only casually mentioned; but this was of comparatively little consequence, as their early reception might have kept back for a time the grand developments which must next be mentioned—immense strides in the theoretical and mathematical treatment of the subject, and to a considerable extent independent of the nature of heat. These are due to Fourier and Sadi Carnot, and it may well be said that it is in great part attributable to their remarkable works that the true theory of heat... received so rapidly its present enormous development. ...Very different in form and object from the systematic treatise of Fourier, is the profound and valuable essay of Sadi Carnot, Reflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu, published in 1824. The author endeavours to determine how it is that heat produces mechanical effect..."

"[W]e must remark the peculiar merit of Carnot's reasoning, which consists in the idea of bringing the body back to its initial state, as to temperature, density, and molecular condition, after a cycle of operations, before making any assertion as to the amount of heat which it contains."

"[F]rom Carnot's point of view, it is evident that the motive power of heat depends upon its being transferred from one body to another through the medium by whose change of volume or form the external mechanical effect is produced, as this medium is supposed to remain at the end of the operation in precisely the same state as at the commencement. He gives as analogous the instance of work derived from water falling from a higher to a lower level."

"Carnot's reasoning... to show that in the ascent of the piston in the cylinder, more work is done against external forces than is required to be done by them to produce the descent and restore the piston to its first position. And in order that Carnot's axiom may be applied with strictness, and yet with simplicity, it is better to consider a hypothetical, than the actual engine."

"It is but bare justice... to acknowledge that Carnot himself was by no means satisfied with the caloric hypothesis and that he insinuates... more than a mere suspicion of its correctness."

"If we carefully examine the... cycle of operations we easily see that they are reversible, i.e., that the transference of the given amount of caloric back again... by performing the same operations in the opposite order, requires that we expend on the piston, on the whole, as much work as was gained during the direct operations. This most important idea is due to Carnot, and from it he deduces his test of a perfect engine, or one which yields from the transference of a given quantity of caloric from one body to another (each being at a given temperature) the greatest possible amount of work. And the test is simply that the cycle of operations must be reversible."

"Carnot proved... that the ratio of the work done by a perfect (i.e., a reversible) engine to the heat taken from the source is a function of the temperatures of the source and condenser only. When these temperatures are nearly equal, this function is... called Carnot's Function. W. Thomson, so early as 1848, seized upon this remarkable proposition, and made it the basis of the earliest suggestion of an absolute Thermometric Scale; absolute in the sense of being based upon strict thermodynamic principles, and entirely independent of the properties of any particular substance."

"Clapeyron, in 1834, recalled attention to Carnot's reasoning, and usefully applied the principle of Watt's diagram of energy to the geometrical exhibition of the different quantities involved in the cycle of operations by which work is derived from heat by the temporary changes it produces in the volume or molecular state of bodies. He also first gave a representation of Carnot's processes in an analytical form. But for nearly twenty years after the appearance of Carnot's treatise little appears to have been done with reference to the theory of heat."

"After the invention of the steam-engine in its present form by James Watt, the attention of engineers and of scientific men was directed to the problem of its further improvement. With this end in view, the young Sadi Carnot, in 1824, published the Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu... Carnot examined the relations between heat and the work done by heat used in an ideal engine, and by reducing the problem to its simplest form... establish[ed] the conditions upon which the economical working of all heat-engines depends. ...[T]hough the proof was invalid, the proposition remained true, and carried with it the truth of such of Carnot’s deductions as were based solely upon it."

"Carnot’s memoir remained for a long time unappreciated, and it was not until use was made of it by William Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), in 1848, to establish an absolute scale of temperature, that the merits of the method proposed in it were recognized."

"Thomson] found that Carnot’s proposition could no longer be proved by denying the possibility of “the perpetual motion,” and was led to lay down a second fundamental principle to serve in the demonstration. This principle [published in Thomson's memoir of March, 1851] is now called the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

"In [1850]... Clausias... lays down a principle for use in the demonstration of Carnot’s proposition, which, while not the same in form as Thomson’s, is the same in content, and ranks as another statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Clausius followed up this paper by others, and subsequently published a book in which the subject of Thermodynamics was given a systematic treatment, and in which he introduced and developed the important function called by him the ."

"The science of Thermodynamics, founded by the labors of these three illustrious men, has led to the most important developments in all departments of physical science. It has pointed out relations among the properties of bodies which could scarcely have been anticipated in any other way; it has laid the foundation for the Science of Chemical Physics; and, taken in connection with the kinetic theory of gases, as developed by Maxwell and Boltzmann, it has furnished a general view of the operations of the universe which is far in advance of any that could have been reached by purely dynamical reasoning."