Atheists From The United States

"I Have vowed, I will never vote for a Democrat again. No matter who they are, I don't care if God becomes a Democrat. These Democrats are Communists, This is Communism, This is Gangsterism, this is Crazy!"

""I am circumcised, and I tell you something, I despise it. I despise it. I despise it... I am completely pissed off that I'm circumcised." ~ Howard Stern"

"I cut my pubes last night. My hairs were getting longer than my penis."

"Don't let the government win."

"Whenever I say something, I say it right at the moment I'm thinking it. As soon as I saw Magic Johnson's press conference, I said, "Hey, this is bullshit. Why are you idolizing a guy who runs around and is a tremendous womanizer? He's running around having unprotected sex in a day and age when he should know better. I don't think you should treat him as a hero."

"It is seen as the application of a systematic “scientific method” involving wearing a white coat and being dull. I feel that too many young people come into science with this view, and that too many fields degenerate into the kind of work which results: automatic crank-turning and data-collecting of the sort which Kuhn calls “normal science” and Rutherford “stamp-collecting”. In fact, the creation of new science is a creative act, literally, and people who are not creative are not very good at it."

"“We atheists can . . . argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse”."

"My Harvard classmate, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote, some years ago, an influential book about scientific revolutions. Fortunately, many scientific revolutions do not follow his scenario, but the one he focused on, the discovery of quantum mechanics, is well described by his model, which is most valid for a revolution occurring in the central core of a mature science."

"All I can say to the younger theorists is: don’t trust anyone over 45, except maybe me, and I’m not so sure about me.”"

"“Of course I am not religious—I don’t in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so ...”"

"That Big Science culture in the USA, and similar groups elswhere, tended to have separate, direct access to government and hence to funding sources. It was independent to a great extent of the rest of science, of which it was never a majority component except in funding."

"Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure."

"... the state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry."

"By symmetry we mean the existence of different viewpoints from which the system appears the same. It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry. The first demonstration of the power of this idea may have been by Newton, who may have asked himself the question: What if the matter here in my hand obeys the same laws as that up in the sky—that is, what if space and matter are homogeneous and isotropic?"

"The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other."

"I learned, practically in my cradle (actually from Bill McMillan's thesis), that the ground state wave function of a system of bosons should necessarily be real and positive, a fact which made his early Monte Carlo simulations infinitely easier."

"My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance."

"The oxide superconductors, particularly those recently discovered that are based on La2CuO4, have a set of peculiarities that suggest a common, unique mechanism: they tend in every case to occur near a metal-insulator transition into an odd-electron insulator with peculiar magnetic properties. This insulating phase is proposed to be the long-sought "resonating-valence-bond" state or "quantum spin liquid" hypothesized in 1973. This insulating magnetic phase is favored by low spin, low dimensionality, and magnetic frustration. The preexisting magnetic singlet pairs of the insulating state become charged superconducting pairs when the insulator is doped sufficiently strongly."

"Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists."

"I do not agree with Quine, that there is no analytic-synthetic distinction to be drawn at all. But I do believe that his emphasis on the monolithic character of our conceptual system and his negative emphasis on the silliness of regarding mathematics as consisting in some sense of 'rules of language', represent exceedingly important theoretical insights in philosophy. I think that what we have to do now is to settle the relatively trivial question concerning analytic statements properly so called ('All bachelors are unmarried'). We have to take a fresh look at the framework principles so much discussed by philosophers, disabusing ourselves of the idea that they are 'rules of language' in any literal or lexicographic sense; and above all, we have to take a fresh look at the nature of logical and mathematical truths. With Quine's contribution, we have to face two choices: We can ignore it and go on talking about the 'logic' of individual words. In that direction lies sterility and more, much more, of what we have already read. The other alternative is to face and explore the insight achieved by Quine, trying to reconcile the fact that Quine is overwhelmingly right in his critique of what other philosophers have done with the analytic-synthetic distinction with the fact that Quine is wrong in his literal thesis, namely, that the distinction itself does not exist at all. In the latter direction lies philosophic progress. For philosophic progress is nothing if it is not the discovery of new areas for dialectical exploration."

"I regard Quine as one of our most stimulating philosophers."

"Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."

"Life is agid. Life is fulgid. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of."

"We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language."

"It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described."

"Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it."

"At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too."

"Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about."

""Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation."

"Set theory in sheep's clothing."

"Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar."

"Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind."

"A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news."

"The issue over there being classes seems more a question of convenient conceptual scheme; the issue over there being centaurs, or brick houses on Elm Street, seems more a question of fact. But I have been urging that this difference is only one of degree, and that it turns upon our vaguely pragmatic inclination to adjust one strand of the fabric of science rather than another in accommodating some particular recalcitrant experience. Conservatism figures in such choices, and so does the quest for simplicity."

"As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience."

"Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?"

"No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole."

"Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space."

"The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings."

"Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism."

"Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes."

"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor."

"How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard."

"You know why that's my favorite hit? Well, they say that the only other two players who ever hit one over there were Ruth and Gehrig. But now they have to say "only Ruth, Gehrig and Williams ever hit one over there.' Yes sir, that's putting the old string bean in some pretty fast company when they say that."

"Gee, I wish I could play here just one season just to see what I could do."

"If we were choosing sides and every player was in the pool my first pick would be Whitey Ford and my second would be Ted Williams. Beyond that there would be just too many and I would be afraid of leaving somebody out. Besides, with Whitey on the mound and Williams in the lineup, the rest of the team wouldn't much matter; we'd still beat just about anybody."

"For my money, Ted Williams is the greatest hitter of all-time. I'd take him over Ruth, I'd take him over Cobb. I'd take him over Cobb because of the combination of power and average. I'd take him over Ruth because with Ruth, you can only speculate about what he would have done in the modern era. Ted Williams hit .388 at the age of 39 in 1957. He was what few of us ever become; he was exactly what he set out to be. He said he wanted to be able to walk down the street some day and have people say "There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived". And if they don't say that, it's only because they don't know what they're talking about."

"If he'd tip his cap just once, he could be elected mayor of Boston in five minutes. I don't think he will ever do it."

"Williams is one batter I thought would break my lifetime batting average of .367. If he'd learned to hit to left, Ted would have broken every record in the book."

"I hope somebody hits .400 soon. Then people can start pestering that guy with questions about the last guy to hit .400."