All Quotes

"Common sense is as rare as genius."

"The physician would be even worse off than he is, if not for the occasional emergence of common sense which breaks through dogmas with intuitive freshness."

"Science and common sense differ as cultivated fruits differ from wild fruits. Science sows its seeds of inquiry, and gathers the fruit. Common sense picks the fruit, such as it, is by the wayside. Common sense has no fields or orchards of knowledge."

"Common Sense and Education: The more you think you have of one, the less you think you need of the other."

"I am but a draper in a room of wool, looking at the patterns, feeling like a fool. I'm going to take my fabric, stretch it to the seams, I want to find what's woven underneath these tailored dreams"

"When I go let it be like James Dean, I don't want to die slow."

"In all spheres of science, art, skill, and handicraft it is never doubted that, in order to master them, a considerable amount of trouble must be spent in learning and in being trained. As regards philosophy, on the contrary, there seems still an assumption prevalent that, though every one with eyes and fingers is not on that account in a position to make shoes if he only has leather and a last, yet everybody understands how to philosophize straight away, and pass judgment on philosophy, simply because he possesses the criterion for doing so in his natural reason."

"The phrase is self-contradictory; "sense" is never "common"."

"It is a strange irony that the principles of science should seem to deny the necessary conviction of common sense."

"Consider the very roots of our ability to discern truth. Above all (or perhaps I should say "underneath all"), common sense is what we depend on – that crazily elusive, ubiquitous faculty we all have to some degree or other.... If we apply common sense to itself over and over again, we wind up building a skyscraper. The ground floor of the structure is the ordinary common sense we all have, and the rules for building news floors are implicit in the ground floor itself. However, working it all out is a gigantic task, and the result is a structure that transcends mere common sense."

"Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor."

"What is common sense? That which attracts the least opposition: that which brings most agreeable and worthy results."

"Common sense is in spite of, not the result of education."

"Science, is I believe, nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields a club."

"Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world."

"The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology."

"Common-sense contents itself with the unreconciled contradiction, laughs when it can, and weeps when it must, and makes, in short, a practical compromise, without trying a theoretical solution."

"These carwreck conversations always seem to end this way, with me knocked out on the gurney and you serenely pull away."

"I just believe that life is more than rehearsing how to die."

"Hints towards the solution of the problem of Eternity can be found in the various symbols and allegories of ancient religions and in some of the modern as well as ancient philosophies."

"I felt that on a basis of a "search for the miraculous" it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying."

"When a man begins to know himself a little he will see in himself many things that are bound to horrify him. So long as a man is not horrified at himself he knows nothing about himself."

"The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design."

"Anyone who compares the bibliography with the reprinted papers will notice that mathematics and physics have not been given equal treatment. There is a strong bias in favor of mathematics. The bias arises from the fact that mathematical papers, provided that are correct and not trivial, have permanent value, whereas most papers in physics journals are ephemeral. For this reason, it is customary to publish complete collected works of mathematicians but only selected works of physicists."

"The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible."

"In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over."

"The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward."

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."

"I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It's a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems."

"All the books that I have seen about the science and the economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. … Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion."

"There’s very good news from the asteroids. It appears that a large fraction of them, including the big ones, are actually very rich in H2O. Nobody imagined that. They thought they were just big rocks … It’s easier to get to an asteroid than to Mars, because the gravity is lower and landing is easier. Certainly the asteroids are much more practical, right now. If we start space colonies in, say, the next 20 years, I would put my money on the asteroids."

"I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity."

"There is an enormous variety of things that we never dreamed of, like... black holes, s, quasars, all these unbelievably active goings-on in the universe... [I]n Aristotle's time the universe... was supposed to be quiescent, it was supposed to be perfect and peaceful, and nothing ever happened in the ; and that remained true... throughout all of the revolutions... It remained the general view of astronomers... through Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and everybody else... until just the last 30 years, and now we know it's not like that at all. In fact the universe is full of violent events, and fantastic strong gravitational fields, and collapsed objects, and huge outpourings of energy. ...The things we understand least are the quasars... the most violent and... energetic objects in the universe, and they're totally... mysterious... and... they're rather frequent; and nobody ever dreamed that they existed... [E]ven after they were found it took a long time before people took them seriously. Nature's imagination is always richer than ours."

"... the most important questions and insights and goals are unpredictable."

"There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use."

"If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives."

"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment."

"A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad."

"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."

"Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual — these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion."

"An awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is the besetting sin of the scientists."

"Science is not a monolithic body of doctrine. Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing. The science of today has broken out of the molds of classical nineteenth-century science, just as the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock broke out of the molds of nineteenth century art. Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry. The diversity of science also finds a parallel in the diversity of religion."

"There is no easy solution to the conflict between fundamentalist Christian dogma and the facts of biological evolution. I am not saying that the conflict could have been altogether avoided. I am saying only that the conflict was made more bitter and more damaging, both to religion and to science, by the dogmatic and self-righteousness of scientists. What was needed was a little more human charity, a little more willingness to listen rather than to lay down the law, a little more humility. Scientists stand in need of these Christian virtues just as much as preachers do."

"Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious."

"Euclid... gave his famous definition of a point: "A point is that which has no parts, or which has no magnitude." …A point has no existence by itself. It exists only as a part of the pattern of relationships which constitute the geometry of Euclid. This is what one means when one says that a point is a mathematical abstraction. The question, What is a point? has no satisfactory answer. Euclid's definition certainly does not answer it. The right way to ask the question is: How does the concept of a point fit into the logical structure of Euclid's geometry? ...It cannot be answered by a definition."

"Imagine, if you can, four things that have very different sizes. First, the entire universe. Second, the planet Earth. Third, the nucleus of an atom. Fourth, a superstring. The step in size from each of these things to the next is roughly the same... twenty powers of ten...."

"What philosophical conclusions should we draw from the abstract style of the superstring theory? We might conclude, as Sir James Jeans concluded long ago, that the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a Pure Mathematician, and that if we work hard enough at mathematics we shall be able to read his mind. Or we might conclude that our pursuit of abstractions is leading us far away from those parts of the creation which are most interesting from a human point of view. It is too early yet to come to conclusions."

"Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel... proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination."

"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations."

"... informed me that my theological standpoint is Socinian. ...If I remember correctly what Hartshorne said, the main tenant ...is that God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He learns and grows as the universe unfolds. ...I merely find ...[this doctrine] congenial, and consistent with common sense. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond our comprehension. ...either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at... present... We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind. If... left behind, it is an end. If we keep growing, it is a beginning."