All Quotes

"He was shaking. A mass verbal attack can do that to a man, can smash his self-respect and set up doubts which remain for hours or days or forever. There are well-developed verbal techniques for many to use against one. You never let the victim speak without interruption; never let him finish a sentence. You interrupt each other so that he can’t quite catch the drift of your arguments, and then he can’t find the flaws. He forgets his rebuttal points because he’s not allowed to put them into words. His only defense is to walk out. If, instead, you throw him out…"

"Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent... If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose... Jesus Pietro worried."

"Our society depends entirely on its technology. Change the technology, and you change the society. Most especially you change the ethics."

"I'm no historian," said Harry. "But morals are morals. What's unethical here and now is unethical anywhere, anytime. "Kane, you're wrong. It is ethical to execute a man for theft?" "Of course." "Did you know that there was once a vastly detailed science of rehabilitation for criminals? It was a branch of psychology, naturally, but it was by far the largest such branch. By the middle of century twenty-one, nearly two-thirds of all criminals could eventually be released as cured." "That's silly. Why go to all that trouble when the organ banks must have been crying for — Oh. I see. No organ banks."

"Parlette, if you have something to say, say it. If we jump to the wrong conclusions, please assume that you’re expressing yourself badly, and don’t try to shift the blame."

"Parlette spoke slowly and evenly. "I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.""

"Yes, the bleeding heart was something else again. A gruesome symbol on a vivarium floor. Fingers that broke without their owner noticing. An ink drawing appearing from nowhere on a dossier cover, like a signature. A signature."

"He kept the gun in his hand. It felt good. He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to drive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stunner was a surer bet than a hypothetical, undependable psi power. It was real, cold and hard in his hand."

"I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on."

"“I don’t doubt you’re serious,” he said wonderingly. “What I doubt is your sanity.”"

"Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts."

"Fear is the brother of hate."

"The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools."

"To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal."

"The perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum. The universe is hostile."

"One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better."

"What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistant Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate)."

"I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said "You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm". At the time this was the last thing on my mind..."

"My programming language was solder."

"No, I happen to be one of those people whose memory shuts down under pressure. The answers would come to me in the middle of the night in my sleep! Besides, I am a millionaire."

"In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this."

"As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was."

"Wikipedia, eh? Must be accurate then!"

"It is to the Italian astronomer, forced in old age by the Inquisition to turn aside from the more dangerous study of the machinery of the heavens, that we owe the first exposition of many of the problems of mechanics and statics, published... in 1638. Not only did Galileo put together whatever the sixteenth century had learned in the sciences affecting building construction, but from his study of the bending strength of a beam there dates a new branch of science—the theory of the strength of materials."

"Conclusions obtained by purely rational processes are, so far as Reality is concerned, entirely empty. It was because he recognized this, and especially because he impressed it upon the scientific world that Galileo became the father of modern physics and in fact of the whole of modern natural science."

"It has always hurt me to think that Galilei did not acknowledge the work of Kepler … That, alas, is vanity … You find it in so many scientists."

"Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom — that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself."

"The beginning of astronomy, except observations, I think is not to be derived from farther time than from Nicolaus Copernicus; who in the age next preceding the present revived the opinion of Pythagoras, Aristarchus, and Philolaus. After him, the doctrine of the motion of the earth being now received, and a difficult question thereupon arising concerning the descent of heavy bodies, Galileus in our time, striving with that difficulty, was the first that opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion. So that neither can the age of natural philosophy be reckoned higher than to him."

"A light was kindled amongst the investigators of nature when Galilei let balls of a definite weight roll down the inclined plane. For they saw that they only understand what is produced according to a predetermined plan or hypothesis... for otherwise planless observations made according to no ideas could never be brought into the form of a law which reason demands and seeks. ...Thus physics was brought into the position of a certain science after groping about blindly for so many hundred years."

"Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were ‘revisionists’ in rejecting the geocentric system of Ptolemy (which held sway for some 1500 years) and, against an oppressive and repressive mainstream opinion (and officialdom), reinstated—with improvements—the heliocentric system of Aristarchos of Samos (3rd cent BCE)."

"Galileo's program offers us a dead world: Out go sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and along with them have since gone esthetic and ethical sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse. Hardly anything has changed our world more during the past four hundred years than Galileo's audacious program. We had to destroy the world in theory before we could destroy it in practice."

"Galileo deduced the laws of freely falling bodies and the parabolic paths of projectiles, initiating an era of applications of mathematics to physics. In his book Two New Sciences, he used indivisible methods to study the motion of a falling body, and he planned, but never wrote, an entire book on indivisibles."

"The first mathematician to consider the nature of the resistance of solids to rupture was Galileo. Although he treated solids as inelastic, not being in possession of any law connecting the displacements produced with the forces producing them, or of any physical hypothesis capable of yielding such a law, yet his enquiries gave the direction which was subsequently followed by many investigators."

"He endeavoured to determine the resistance of a beam, one end of which is built into a wall, when the tendency to break it arises from its own or an applied weight; and he concluded that the beam tends to turn about an axis perpendicular to its length, and in the plane of the wall. This problem, and, in particular, the determination of this axis is known as Galileo's problem."

"History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun. How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history? There is a thirst out there both for knowledge and to be entertained, and the market has responded with enthusiasm."

"Galileo's comprehension of the concept of acceleration, which he defined as a change of velocity either in magnitude or direction... was an abstract idea that no one seems to have thought much about before. And in using it to test the still accepted Aristotelian precept that a moving object requires a force to maintain it, Galileo easily demonstrated that it is not motion but rather acceleration which cannot occur without an external force. Deliberately rejecting common sense as a prejudiced witness, he let nature herself speak in the form of a "hard, smooth and very round ball" rolling down a "very straight" ideal groove lined with polished parchment, and then rolling up another groove, clocking each roll "hundreds or times"... he showed that, while downward motion (helped by gravity force) makes speed increase and upward motion (hindered by gravity force) makes speed decrease, there is always a "boundary case" in between... where speed remains constant (without any appreciable force)—and that, by reducing friction, this boundary case can be made to approach a horizontal level where gravity has no effect. Similarly testing... he also drafted a law of falling bodies: "that the distances traversed, during equal intervals of time... stand to one another in the same ratio as the odd numbers beginning with unity." And his beautiful analysis of a cannonball's trajectory into horizontal and vertical components... was one day to be of enormous help to Isaac Newton in solving the riddle of gravity."

"It was in Galileo's time that firearms were invented... What is the path of a cannonball? ...Characteristically, Galileo was engrossed with the problem; characteristically, he solved it. The outcome of his ingenuity we know today as the method of superposition."

"How do heavy bodies fall? ...Galileo's investigation of dynamics was physical; Aristotle's was metaphysical. But unlike Galileo, we have the additional convenience of algebraic notation. Had it been invented in his day he would certainly have known it; almost certainly he would have been able to push his development of dynamics much farther."

"Galileo's head was on the block... The crime was looking up for truth... And then you had to bring up reincarnation... How long 'til my soul gets it right... Can any human being ever reach that kind of light... I call on the resting soul of Galileo... King of night vision, king of insight... I'm not making a joke, you know me...I take everything so seriously... If we wait for the time 'til all souls get it right... Then at least I know there'll be no nuclear annihilation... Can any human being ever reach the highest light... Except for Galileo — God rest his soul... Except for the resting soul of Galileo... King of night vision, king of insight."

"If Galileo had been willing to face the idea of a plurality of worlds, instead of resting on that of the Sun as the natural "centre of things," he might have been impelled to develop his system in the Newtonian sense. ...The position of the satellites in the Copernican scheme proved the existence of a multiplicity of centers. But the way that led from there was fraught with danger."

"The allusion to the "puzzling" problem of [the orbit of] Mars shows that Galileo ought not to have been unaware of the great work of Kepler published in 1609: Astronomia nova... in which the first two of Kepler's laws were formulated. Yet he does not mention here at all Kepler's success in solving the problem, nor his laws, nor his name even, which is brought up... only to criticize his belief in the Moon's attraction [effect upon tides], which is quite reasonably presented in the Astronomia nova and founded on astronomical reasons and not on mystical speculations."

"To give us the science of motion God and Nature have joined hands and created the intellect of Galileo."

"The old Greek philosophy, which in Europe in the later middle ages was synonymous with the works of Aristotle, considered motion as a thing for which a cause must be found: a velocity required a force to produce and to maintain it. The great discovery of Galileo was that not velocity, but acceleration requires a force. This is the law of inertia of which the real content is: the natural phenomena are described by differential equations of the second order."

"[T]he mathematical habit of mind and the mathematical procedure... had to be generated; otherwise Newton could never have thought of a formula representing the force between any two masses at any distance. ...Throughout the middle ages, under the influence of Aristotle, the science was entirely misconceived. Newton had the advantage of coming after a series of great men, notably Galileo... who in the previous two centuries had reconstructed the science and had invented the right way of thinking about it. He completed their work."

"The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir."

"The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed."

"In Galileo's time, professors of philosophy and theology—the subjects were inseparable—produced grand discourses on the nature of reality... all based on sophisticated metaphysical arguments. Meanwhile, Galileo measured how fast balls roll down inclined planes. How mundane! But the learned discourses, while grand, were vague. Galileo's investigations were clear and precise. The old metaphysics never progressed, while Galileo's work bore abundant, and at length spectacular, fruit. Galileo too cared about the big questions, but he realized that getting the genuine answers requires patience and humility before the facts."

"How does the world recognizes England, the United Kingdom, as the country that gave birth to the modern age? It was not Newton but Galilei who opened the Moderna age."

"As a believing scientist [...] it is my deep conviction that it is our task to search nature and the universe, as Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, did, for the footprints of God."

"Majority rule will only work if you're considering individual rights. You can't have five wolves and one sheep vote on what they want to have for supper"