Inventors

"Foes of what's cooking see no worth behind it. Those that are looking for nothing — will find it."

"if you possess more than just eight things then y o u are possessed by t h e m"

"Idiots are really one hundred per cent when they are also intelligent."

"The way to grow grand is not: to demand. In life's every field you are what you yield."

"Wisdom is the booby prize given when you've been unwise."

"The road to wisdom? — Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less."

"Freedom means you're free to do just whatever pleases you; — if, of course that is to say, what you please is what you may."

"People are self-centered to a nauseous degree. They will keep on about themselves while I'm explaining me."

"Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back."

"The universe may be as great as they say. But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist."

"Put up in a place where it's easy to see the cryptic admonishmentT.T.T.When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb, it's well to remember that Things Take Time."

"As eternity is reckoned there's a lifetime in a second."

"Love is like a pineapple, sweet and undefinable."

"Living is a thing you do now or never — which do you?"

"Naive you are if you believe life favours those who aren't naive."

"Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again."

"Somebody said that Reason was dead. Reason said: No, I think not so."

"I am a humble artist moulding my earthly clod, adding my labour to nature's, simply assisting God. Not that my labour is needed, yet somehow I understand, my Maker has deemed it that I too should have Unmoulded clay in my hand."

"There is one art, no more, no less: to do all things with art- lessness."

"After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s theory of relativity — now that is a work of art! Einstein was more of an artist in physics than on his violin. Art is this: art is the solution of a problem which cannot be expressed explicitly until it is solved."

"Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily — physically or mentally — around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better."

"Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, and you're hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No — not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping"

"Co-existence or no existence."

"The noble art of losing face may some day save the human race and turn into eternal merit what weaker minds would call disgrace."

"Those who always know what’s best are a universal pest."

"I am impressed by the great limitations of the human mind. How quick are we to learn, that is, to imitate what others have done or thought before. And how slow to understand, that is, to see the deeper connections. Slowest of all, however, are we in inventing new connections or even in applying old ideas in a new field."

"Doing physics is much more enjoyable than just learning it. Maybe 'doing it' is the right way of learning, at least as far as I am concerned."

"Experiments are intended to teach, and not to mystify."

"For the mere purpose of entertainment and the excitement of wonder, a display of brilliant electric experiments, even when performed in the most promiscuous and confused order, never fail to afford ample gratification to the curiosity. The studious observer, however, whose business is to inquire into the true beauties of the science, requires the most judicious arrangement of the phenomena that can possibly be devised, in order to facilitate his acquaintance with them, and with the laws by which they are displayed and associated with each other."

"Dead is when the chemists take over the subject."

"Anything will lase if you hit it hard enough."

"A diatomic molecule is a molecule with one atom too many."

"Never measure anything but frequency!"

"To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know one thing that isn't known."

"Anything worth doing is worth doing twice, the first time quick and dirty and the second time the best way you can."

"It is so difficult to find something interesting and new, but instead of helping me to develop fledgling ideas in their infancy, you guys immediately look for a way to attack them."

"An intelligent person should never resolve a dispute with brute force."

"The problem of thermonuclear reactions is not a usual physics problem. This is a problem that must transform society and the world. Our generation, which gave to mankind atomic energy and thermonuclear energy in the form of explosions, is responsible to humanity for solving the main problem of energy – obtaining energy from water. People are waiting for the solution of this problem. Our duty is to solve it within the lifetime of our generation, and therefore we must set out on this path."

"I was threatened to be ducked in the pond if I proceeded, and of course we had a great deal of the survey to take by stealth at the time when the persons were at dinner; we would not get it by night, for we were watched day and night and guns were discharged over the ground belonging to Captain Bradshaw to prevent us. I can state further, I was twice turned off the ground myself by his men; and they said if I did not go instantly they would carry me off to Worsley."

"I got leave to go from Killingworth to lay down a railway at Hetton, and next to Darlington, and after that I went to Liverpool to plan the line to Manchester. I there pledged myself to attain a speed of ten miles an hour. I said I had no doubt the engine would go much faster, but we had better be moderate at the beginning. The directors said I was quite right, for if when they came to Parliament I talked of going at a greater rate than ten miles an hour, I would put a cross on the concern. It was not an easy task for me to keep engines down to ten miles an hour, but it must be done, and did my best. I had to place myself in the most unpleasant of all situations, the witness-box of a Parliamentary Committee. Someone inquired if I was a foreigner, and another hinted that I was mad. Many became alarmed at this "Watt run wild," and in order to prevent these mad steam engines running beyond an old horse trot, they got two eminent engineers to act as Lunacy Commissioners. These gentlemen proved it was practically and commercially inexpedient. I put up with insult and rebuff, and went on with my plans, determined not to be put down. Improvements were made every day, and to-day a train has brought me from London in the morning and enabled me to take my place in this room."

"The rage for railroads is so great that many will be laid in parts where they will not pay."

"This railway is the most absurd scheme that ever entered into the head of a man to conceive. Mr. Stephenson never had a plan — I do not believe he is capable of making one. He is either ignorant or something else which I will not mention. His is a mind perpetually fluctuating between opposite difficulties; he neither knows whether he is to make bridges over roads or rivers, or of one size or another; or to make embankments, or cuttings, or inclined planes, or in what way the thing is to be carried into effect. When you put a question to him upon a difficult point, he resorts to two or three hypothesis, and never comes to a decided conclusion. Is Mr. Stephenson to be the person upon whose faith this Committee is to pass this Bill involving property to the extent of £400,000/£500,000 when he is so ignorant of his profession as to propose to build a bridge not sufficient to carry off the flood water of the river or to permit any of the vessels to pass which of necessity must pass under it."

"I observe you have thought proper to insert the last number of the Philosophical Magazine your opinion that my attempts at the safety tubes and apertures were borrowed from what I have heard of Sir Humphrey Davy's researches. The principles upon which a safety lamp might be constructed I stated to several persons long before Sir Humphrey Davy came into this part of the country. The plan of such a lamp was seen by several and the lamp itself was in the hands of the manufacturers during the time he was here."

"I am glad to learn that the Parliament Bill has been passed for the Darlington Railway. I am much obliged by the favourable sentiments you express towards me, and shall be happy if I can be of service in carrying into execution your plans."

"It will hereafter be scarcely believed that an invention so eminently scientific, and which could never have been derived but from the sterling treasury of science, should have been claimed on behalf of an engine-wright of Killingworth, of the name of Stephenson — a person not even possessing a knowledge of the elements of chemistry."

"To tell you the truth although it would put £500 in my pockets to specify my own patent rails, I cannot do so after the experience I have had."

"Teller’s calculations were faulty; his prototype would have been a dud. This was first noticed by Stanislaw Ulam... Having shown that the Teller scheme was a nonstarter, Ulam produced, in his typically absent-minded fashion, a workable alternative. “I found him at home at noon staring intensely out of a window with a very strange expression on his face,” Ulam’s wife recalled. “I can never forget his faraway look as peering unseeing in the garden, he said in a thin voice—I can still hear it—‘I found a way to make it work.’”"

"I contributed; Ulam did not. I'm sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, "I don't believe in it.""

"[I]t was seeing the gist, the inner core of a problem, that enabled him to open so many new roads—roads that often led to new branches of mathematics. ...Cellular automata theory, which he proposed to von Neumann; the of solving intractable problems, not only in probability theory but in areas such as number theory where the method would not have been thought applicable; and his work on nonlinear processes that anticipated today's interest in solitons and "chaos." We still do not know—it remains a government secret—what jumped into Ulam's head that made it possible for Edward Teller to build the H-bomb."

"With his unusual looks and magnetic green eyes, he always seemed to stand out in a crowd. I remember a party years later when Georgia O'Keefe pointed an imperious finger in his direction and exclaimed "Who is that man?""