First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"Last words: "I bless the Lord that he gave me counsel.""
"Trouble me not; such an idol is accursed, and therefore I will not touch it.' The patron and the arguesyn (i.e. sergeant who commanded the forcats) with two officers, having the chief charge of all such matters, said, 'Thou shalt handle it,' and so they violently thrust it to his face, and put it betwixt his hands, who seeing the extremity, taking the idol and advisedly looking about, he cast it into the river, and said, 'Let our lady now save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to swim.' After that was no Scotchman urged with that idolatry."
"If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, no doubt they may be resisted, even by power. For there is neither greater honor, nor greater obedience, to be given to kings or princes, than God hath commanded to be given unto father and mother. But the father may be stricken with a frenzy, in which he would slay his children. If the children arise, join themselves together, apprehend the father, take the sword from him, bind his hands, and keep him in prison till his frenzy be overpast: think ye, Madam, that the children do any wrong? It is even so, Madam, with princes that would murder the children of God that are subjects unto them. Their blind zeal is nothing but a very mad frenzy, and therefore, to take the sword from them, to bind their hands, and to cast them into prison, till they be brought to a more sober mind, is no disobedience against princes, but just obedience, because it agreeth with the will of God."
"To the verteuus and godlie Elizabeht by the grace of GOD quen of England etc John Knox desireht the perpetuall Encrease of the Holie Spiritt. etc. As your graces displeasur against me most Iniustlie conceaned, hath be[en] and is to my wretched hart a burthen grevous and almost intollerabill, so is the testimonye of a clean conscience to me a stay and vphold that in desperation I sink not, how vehement that ever the temptations appear, for in GODD is presence my conscience beareht me reacord that maliciouslie nor of purpose I inoffended your grace, nor your realme. And therfor how so ever I be ludged by man, I am assured to be absolued by him who onlie knoweht the secreatis of hartes."
"John Knox had been a topical preacher, i.e., preaching on the cultural circumstances and political occurrences of the time. For Knox in the mid-1500s this meant that his sermons were typically anti-Catholic, and especially they were anti-Mary Queen of Scots sermons! Since Knox was a typical model for these Scots-Irish preachers on the Virginia frontier, that might have indicated that their worship services included the congregation's recitation of both the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, but their sermons were probably scriptural exhortations against the demonic powers of this world... which was the main reason that those powers in Williamsburg were suspicious of such traveling dissenters!"
"Here lies one who neither flattered nor feared any flesh."
"First, I say, that woman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him. As St. Paul does reason in these words: "Man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. And man was not created for the cause of the woman, but the woman for the cause of man; and therefore ought the woman to have a power upon her head" [1 Cor. 11:8-10] (that is, a cover in sign of subjection). Of which words it is plain that the apostle means, that woman in her greatest perfection should have known that man was lord above her; and therefore that she should never have pretended any kind of superiority above him, no more than do the angels above God the Creator, or above Christ their head.[38] So I say, that in her greatest perfection, woman was created to be subject to man."
"The Mass is Idolatry. All worshipping, honouring, or service invented by the brain of man in the religion of God, without his own express commandment, is idolatry. The Mass is invented by the brain of man, without any commandment of God; therefore it is idolatry."
"But hereof be assured, that all is not lawful nor just that is statute by civil laws; neither yet is everything sin before God, which ungodly persons allege to be treason."
"As touching nature I am a worm of this earth, and yet a subject of this commonwealth; but as touching the office wherein it has pleased God to place me [head of the Reformed church in Scotland], I am a watchman...For that reason I am bound in conscience to blow the trumpet publicly."
"Madam, in God's presence I speak: I never delighted in the weeping of any of God's creatures; yea I can scarcely well abide the tears of my own boys whom my own hand corrects, much less can I rejoice in your Majesty's weeping."
"None have I corrupted. None have I defrauded. Merchandise have I not made — to God's glory I write — of the glorious Evangel of Jesus Christ; but, according to the measure of the grace granted unto me, I have divided the Sermon of Truth in just parts, beating down the rebellion of the proud against God, and raising up the consciences troubled with the knowledge of their sins, by declaring Jesus Christ, the strength of His Death, and the mighty operation of His Resurrection, in the hearts of the Faithful. Of this, I say, I have a testimony this day in my conscience, before God, however the world rage."
"To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finalie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice."
"To the question how she can be the image of God, [Augustine] answers as follows: "Woman," says he, "compared to other creatures, is the image of God, for she bears dominion over them. But compared unto man, she may not be called the image of God, for she bears not rule and lordship over man, but ought to obey him," etc.[57] And how that woman ought to obey man, he speaks yet more clearly in these words, "The woman shall be subject to man as unto Christ. For woman," says he, "has not her example from the body and from the flesh, that so she shall be subject to man, as the flesh is unto the Spirit, because that the flesh in the weakness and mortality of this life lusts and strives against the Spirit, and therefore would not the Holy Ghost give example of subjection to the woman of any such thing," etc. This sentence of Augustine ought to be noted of all women, for in it he plainly affirms, that woman ought to be subject to man, that she never ought more to desire preeminence [over] him, than that she ought to desire above Christ Jesus"
"Against God can nothing be more manifest than that a woman shall be exalted to reign above man; for the contrary sentence he has pronounced in these words: "Thy will shall be subject to thy husband, and he shall bear dominion over thee" (Gen. 3:16). As [though] God should say, "Forasmuch as you have abused your former condition, and because your free will has brought yourself and mankind into the bondage of Satan, I therefore will bring you in bondage to man. For where before your obedience should have been voluntary, now it shall be by constraint and by necessity; and that because you have deceived your man, you shall therefore be no longer mistress over your own appetites, over your own will or desires. For in you there is neither reason nor discretion which are able to moderate your affections, and therefore they shall be subject to the desire of your man. He shall be lord and governor, not only over your body, but even over your appetites and will." This sentence, I say, did God pronounce against Eve and her daughters, as the rest of the scriptures do evidently witness. So that no woman can ever presume to reign above man, but the same she must needs do in despite of God, and in contempt of his punishment and malediction."
"Czar, I bless thee. I kiss the hem of thy garment. I drink to thy health and longevity. Give us war in our time, O Lord!"
"If there is to be a war between England and the United States, tis impossible for us to pretend sympathy with the former. We shall have allies, not enemies, on the banks of the Columbia, and distant and desolate as are those tracts beyond the Rocky Mountains, even there may arise an opportunity for demanding and regaining our place among the nations."
"The people are beginning to fear that the Irish Government is merely a machinery for their destruction; that, for all the usual functions of Government, this Castle-nuisance is altogether powerless; that it is unable, or unwilling, to take a single step for the prevention of famine, for the encouragement of manufactures, or providing fields of industry, and is only active in promoting, by high premiums and bounties, the horrible manufacture of crimes!"
"The world may be utterly crazy And life may be labour in vain; But I'd rather be silly than lazy, And would not quit life for its pain."
"Maxwell, and then Boltzmann, and then... J. Willard Gibbs consequently expended enormous intellectual effort in devising... , or... . The uses... extend far beyond gases... describing electric and magnetic interactions, chemical reactions, phase transitions... and all other manner of exchanges of matter and energy. The success... has driven the belief among many physicists that it could be applied with similar success to society. ...[E]verything from the flow of funds in the stock market to the flow of traffic on interstate highways ..."
"Maxwell... during the 1860s... showed that when the velocities reached the bell-shaped distribution, no further net change was likely. (...Ludwig Boltzmann further elaborated... and strengthened Maxwell's results). Any specific molecule would speed up or slow down, but... other molecules would change in speed to compensate. When a gas reached that state... the gas was at equilibrium. ...[T]his notion of equilibrium is precisely analogous to the Nash equilibrium in game theory. ...[J]ust as the Nash equilibrium is typically a mixed set of strategies, a gas seeks an equilibrium state with a mixed distribution of molecular velocities."
"The essential feature of Maxwell's work was showing that the properties of gases made sense not if gas molecules all flew around at a similar "average" velocity, as Clausius had surmised, but only if they moved at all sorts of speeds, most near the average, but some substantially faster or slower, and a few very fast or slow. ...Just as Quetelet's average man was fictitious, and key insights into society came from analyzing the spread of features around the average, understanding gases meant figuring out the range and distribution of molecular velocities around the average. And that distribution, Maxwell calculated, matched the bell-shaped curve describing the range of measurement errors."
"Maxwell probably first encountered Quetelet in an article by... John Herschel... (...familiar with Quetelet as a fellow astronomer). Later, in 1857, Maxwell read a newly published book by... Henry Thomas Buckle. Buckle, himself clearly influenced by Quetelet, believed that science could discover the "laws of the human mind" and that human actions are a part of "one vast system of universal order." ...Though Maxwell found Buckle's book "bumptious," he recognized it as a source of original ideas, and the statistical reasoning Buckle applied to society seemed just the thing... needed to deal with molecular motion."
"Maxwell... mastered electricity and magnetism, light and heat, pretty much mopping up all the major areas of physics beyond those that Newton had... taken care of—gravitation and the laws of motion. ...Maxwell detected an essential shortcoming in Newton's laws of motion, too. They worked... for macroscopic objects, like cannonballs and rocks. But what about the submicroscopic molecules from which such objects were made? ...Newton's laws ...did you no good because you could not possibly trace the motion of an individual molecule ...Maxwell applied the sort of statistical thinking that Quetelet had promoted."
"[I]n the mid-19th century math seemed... useless for physicists pondering the complexities of molecular motions in gases. ...How could anyone grasp the inner workings of a mass of molecules too numerous to count and too small to be seen? Yet... Maxwell found a way, by using statistics—mathematical descriptions of large groups of molecules. ...Maxwell got the idea to use statistics in physics from social scientists applying math to society!"
"Changing electric fields produce magnetic fields, and changing magnetic fields produce electric fields. Thus the fields can animate one another in turn, giving birth to self-reproducing disturbances that travel at the speed of light. Ever since Maxwell, we understand that these disturbances are what light is."
"In a famous memoir, Clerk Maxwell showed nearly a hundred years ago that Saturn's rings would be unstable if they were solid, and that they must consist of a swarm of separate bodies. In a system of particles rotating about a centre of gravitational attraction the innermost particles will rotate more rapidly than the outermost, in order to counteract the stronger gravitational pull towards the centre. In studying the problem of Galactic rotation we are almost entirely dependent on the determination of velocities in the line of sight, which can be measured spectroscopically by the . ...On the theory of Galactic rotation stars which are further from the centre than the sun will tend, in general, to move more slowly, i.e. relative to the sun they will lag behind, whereas stars nearer to the centre will race ahead."
"Maxwell's importance in the history of scientific thought is comparable to Einstein's (whom he inspired) and to Newton's (whose influence he curtailed)"
"In electromagnetism... the law of the inverse square had been supreme, but, as a consequence of the work of Faraday and Maxwell, it was superseded by the field. And the same change took place in the theory of gravitation. By and by the material particles, electrically charged bodies, and magnets which are the things that we actually observe come to be looked upon only as "singularities" in the field."
"Maxwell's equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents."
"One reason for the success of Maxwell's teaching texts, and those of Thomson and Tait, is that they were... expounding in clear and persuasive language the new understanding in basic physics that their authors had been responsible for developing... In a way, Maxwell's contributions to the great ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were a natural development of his zeal for teaching. They covered Atom, Attraction, Capillary action, Constitution of bodies, Diagrams, Diffusion, Ether, Faraday, Harmonic analysis, and Physical sciences. ...Maxwell deserves to be remembered as one of the nineteenth century's notable pedagogues. ...His expertise was built upon understanding, enthusiasm, hard work, and experience."
"I want to talk about thought experiments and how they can work, and I want to do that by talking about my favorite example which is Maxwell's equations, the laws of electromagnetism. Again, these are more equations, but it's ok because they're on a T-shirt. So these laws govern the behavior of electric and magnetic fields, but actually, when Maxwell was a boy... there was a missing term. ...When Maxwell got into the field these were the equations, and they had been discovered experimentally, and I want to say a little bit about them. So this bit here is Gauss's law\nabla \cdot \mathbf{D} = \rho_\mathrm{v}it says that electric charges produce electric fields. This bit is Ampere's law\mathbf{\nabla} \times \mathbf{H} = \mathbf{J}it says that a electric currents produce magnetic fields. Faraday's law\nabla \times \mathbf{E} = -\frac{\partial \mathbf{B}} {\partial t}says that oscillating magnetic fields can also produce electric fields... These were discovered and confirmed by a tremendous amount of data. They were consistent with all known measurements/observations of electromagnetism in Maxwell's day, but there are a problem, and the problem was exposed by a . The thought experiment is simply to consider a rapidly oscillating current with a break in the circuit, a ... and the problem is that if you use those equations to calculate the magnetic field next to the capacitor you don't get definite answer, you get two different answers, depending on how you use the equations. So there is something wrong. Even without doing this experiment you know that there is something wrong with those equations, and from this clue and a lot more reasoning... Maxwell was able to figure out that he could fix this by adding one more term [to Ampere's law]...\nabla \times \mathbf{H} = \mathbf{J} +\frac{\partial \mathbf{D}} {\partial t}and with this the equations are mathematically and physically well posed. They give unambiguous answers to questions like the one I mentioned. Now, Maxwell got a huge bonus because... Faraday's law says that an oscillating magnetic field produces an electric field. Maxwell's new term says that an oscillating electric field produces a magnetic field. So each can produce the other, and so you can get a disturbance which is self-sustaining, and which doesn't just sustain... but moves... Faraday, Maxwell, Faraday, Maxwell... you get a self-sustaining disturbance which moves at a velocity that you get from the equations, and the velocity is the speed of light. So Maxwell got a huge bonus for understanding the unification of electricity and magnetism. He understood the nature of light! When I first heard about this in high school I thought this was the coolest thing, and I still do. It's what we're all trying to do."
"He achieved greatness unequalled."
"What does distinguish Maxwell to a great degree is a strong intuition, rising at times to divination, which goes hand in hand with rich power of imagination. For the latter quality much evidence can be cited: his predilection for diagrams, his use of roll-curves [Rollkui'Ven], of stereoscopic figures, of reciprocal force-planes [Kraefteplaenen]."
"From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade."
"The work of James Clerk Maxwell changed the world forever."
"The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations of the electromagnetic field."
"If the idea of physical reality had ceased to be purely atomic, it still remained for the time being purely mechanistic; people still tried to explain all events as the motion of inert masses; indeed no other way of looking at things seemed conceivable. Then came the great change, which will be associated for all time with the names of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, and Hertz. The lion's share in this revolution fell to Clerk Maxwell. He showed that the whole of what was then known about light and electro-magnetic phenomena was expressed in his well known double system of differential equations, in which the electric and magnetic fields appear as the dependent variables. Maxwell did, indeed try to explain, or justify, these equations by intellectual constructions. But... the equations alone appeared as the essential thing and the strength of the fields as the ultimate entities, not to be reduced to anything else."
"The first clear sign of a breakdown in communication between physics and mathematics was the extraordinary lack of interest among mathematicians in James Clerk Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electromagnetism. Maxwell discovered his equations, which describe the behavior of electric and magnetic fields under the most general conditions, in the year 1861, and published a clear and definitive statement of them in 1865. This was the great event of nineteenth century physics, achieving for electricity and magnetism what Newton had achieved for gravitation two hundred years earlier. Maxwell's equations contained, among other things, the explanation of light as an electromagnetic phenomenon, and the basic principles of electric power transmission and radio technology. ...But in addition to their physical applications, Maxwell's equations had abstract mathematical qualities which were profoundly new and important. Maxwell's theory was formulated in terms of a new style of mathematical concept, a extending throughout space and time and obeying coupled partial differential equations of peculiar symmetry. ...If they had taken Maxwell's equations to heart as Euler took Newton's, they would have discovered, among other things, Einstein's theory of special relativity, the theory of s and their linear representations, and probably large pieces of the theory of hyperbolic differential equations and functional analysis. A great part of twentieth century physics and mathematics could have been created in the nineteenth century, simply by exploring to the end the mathematical concepts to which Maxwell's equations naturally lead."
"In the study of electricity and magnetism we may consider phenomena in which conditions do not vary as time passes by; the electric charges and the magnets remain at rest, and the currents flowing in fixed wires do not vary in intensity. Conditions are then termed stationary [static]; it is as though time played no part. The laws which govern this type of phenomena were discovered empirically over a century ago, and were expressed mathematically in terms of spatial vectors. The problem of ascertaining how electric and magnetic phenomena would behave when conditions ceased to be stationary was one that could not be predicted; further experimental research was necessary before the general laws could be obtained. Even so, the difficulties were considerable, and it needed Maxwell's genius to establish the laws from the incomplete array of experimental evidence then at hand. All this work extended over nearly a century; it was slow and laborious. Yet, had men realised that our world was one of four-dimensional Minkowskian space-time, and not one of separate space and time, things would have been different. By extending the well-known stationary laws to four-dimensional space-time, through the mere addition of time components to the various trios of space ones, we should have written out inadvertently the laws governing varying fields, or, in other words, we should have constructed Maxwell's celebrated equations. Electromagnetic induction, discovered experimentally by Faraday, the additional electrical term introduced tentatively by Maxwell, radio waves, everything in the electromagnetics of the field, could have been foreseen at one stroke of the pen. A century of painstaking effort could have been saved. We are assuming that a four-dimensional vector calculus would have been in existence; but this is purely a mathematical question."
"In order to appreciate the nature of Maxwell's contributions , let us recall how matters stood in his day. ... ...states that a variable magnetic field generates an electric field. Maxwell, however, considered that this law, standing alone, lacked symmetry; so he formulated the hypothesis that conversely a variable electric field should generate a magnetic one, and proceeded to construct his theory... no experimental results could be claimed to have justified any such assumption... His celebrated equations of electromagnetics represented, therefore, the results of experiment, supplemented by this additional hypothetical assumption. The advisability of making this hypothesis was accentuated when it was found to ensure the law of conservation of electricity. ...In the particular case of free space in which only fields but no charges or currents are present, Maxwell's equations of electromagnetics, termed field-equations (since they describe the state of the electromagnetic field), can be written:"
"The influence of Quetelet's ideas spread throughout the sciences, even to the physical sciences. The two primary founders of the modern kinetic theory of gases, based on considerations of probability, were James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann. Both acknowledged their debt to Quetelet. ...historians generally consider the influence of the natural sciences on the social sciences, whereas in the case of Maxwell and Boltzmann, there is an influence of the social sciences on the natural sciences, as Theodore Porter has shown."
"Pisarro explained the Neo-Impressionist theories to his dealer Durand-Ruel in a letter written towards the end of 1886. He stressed the importance of Seurat's role as inventor of the theory, and described the new function of colour, which replaced the mechanical mixtures of pigments with optical mixtures, where colours partially fused in the spectator's eye. The component parts of each optical colour mixture were to be painted in separate touches so that they retained their colour purity. When colours were mixed on the palette, they could only be combined with close neighbors on the colour circle, so as to avoid excessive dulling of the hues. Pissaro noted that the great colour theorists who had influenced Seurat's thinking were Chevreul, the Scott Maxwell, and the American Ogden Rood. Optical colour mixtures, they argued, were more luminous than mixed pigments."
"But listen, what harmony holy Is mingling its notes with our own! The discord is vanishing slowly, And melts in that dominant tone. And they that have heard it can never Return to confusion again, Their voices are music for ever, And join in the mystical strain."
"Ask no more, then, "what is best, How shall those you love be blest," Ask at once eternal Rest, Peace and assurance giving. Rest of Life and not of death, Rest in Love and Hope and Faith, Til the God who gives their breath Calls them to rest from living."
"By the hollow mauntain-side Questions strange I shout for ever, While echoes far and wide Seem to mock my vain endeavour; Still I shout, for though they never Cast my borrowed voice aside, Words from empty words they sever— Words of Truth from words of Pride."
"How the learned fool would wonder Were he now to see his blunder, When he put his reason under The control of worldly Pride."
"I think men of science as well as other men need to learn from Christ, and I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable. But I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonize his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself, and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society."
"I maintain that all the evil influences that I can trace have been internal and not external, you know what I mean—that I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me, and that if I escape, it is only by God's grace helping me to get rid of myself, partially in science, more completely in society, — but not perfectly except by committing myself to God as the instrument of His will, not doubtfully, but in the certain hope that that Will will be plain enough at the proper time. Nevertheless, you see things from the outside directly, and I only by reflexion, so I hope that you will not tell me you have little fault to find with me, without finding that little and communicating it."
"In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data."