Scientists

"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes."

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

"Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects."

"The scientists never make any money. They are always deluded into thinking that they live in a just universe that will reward them for their work and for their inventions. And this is probably the fundamental delusion that scientists tend to suffer from in our society."

"The degree of scientific knowledge existing in an early period of society was much greater than the moderns are willing to admit but, it was confined to the temples, carefully veiled from the eyes of the people and opposed only to the priesthood."

"The older the scientist you choose to do your Ph.D. thesis with, the more likely you will find yourself working in a field that saw its better days a long time ago, possibly before you were born. Even when a mature scientist still has all his marbles, he often wants to put more bricks into an edifice that already has enough rooms. ... Young professors in contrast are generally hired not for grandeur but because they represent a new intellectual thrust not present in a department, one with hopes of remaining lively over at least the next decade. Moreover, they are likely to have smaller research groups than more senior professors, around whom funds as well as stodgier minds tend to aggregate."

"It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell."

"Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study."

"No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

"… it is shameful that there are so few women in science... In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine."