Inventors

"Come Live With Me, with Jimmy Stewart, one of the sweetest men in the world. I was so happy about this picture; it was my first chance to do a charming, humorous story. Until then, my image was that of an exotic creature. My character name in that movie was Johnny Jones. In H. M. Pulham, Esq., I was tagged Marvin Myles, and in Comrade X I was christened Theodore. Why, I wondered, did they give a supposedly sexy lady such weird names? Ah, Hollywood!"

"A writer, a brilliant writer, wants to write the real book about me. He wants to call it The Users—the people who have used me."

"They wanted something cheap and stupid. They wanted something dumb. But I have little shelves in my brain, and it's all there, it's the truth."

"The most horrible whores are famous. I did what I did for love. The others did it for money."

"Is that chubby‐faced Austrian kid in Boom Town actually me? Did I really wait on the set (being the newest and having the smallest role) to do my close ups, just to wind up looking like that? Clark Gable, so warm and friendly to the insecure actress … Claudette Colbert, such a lady to me, although much higher in the MGM pecking order."

"Which director did I like? I've for gotten which. Some of them were not so nice. When somebody isn't accepted by me, it's complete hate. One director never spoke to me, not even hello in the morning. Mr. Mayer never spoke to me. One day I said, "Mr. Mayer, why don't you ever say hello to me?" He said, "Why should I? You're not my wife." It was only because I wouldn't sleep with him. I didn't know anything filthy went on."

"First he married Joan Bennett, then he married me, then he married Myrna Loy. I had a wonderful first love affair. I like men. Gene Markey was the only civilized man. He used to spit into a spittoon."

"Ziegfeld Girl. When I see those infinite stairs in that lavish production number that out‐Metro's even Metro, I break up. The director, Robert Z. Leonard, had instructed me to walk down them regally, with Lana on one side and my dear friend Judy on the other. I was to float with head erect, arms disdainfully away from my body in the accepted Ziegfeld manner, and never, but never, look down to see where I was going. The fact that I couldn't see in the blinding lights, even straight ahead, was small consolation. And so I descended, teetering down what felt like millions of steps, in a glorious Adrian costume encrusted with enough twinkling stars to make Neil Armstrong jealous. Out of camera range, a board was strapped on my back, and part of the headdress was attached to this apparatus. Also out of camera range, my bosom was taped from behind and I felt a little like some religious penitent in the 13th century walking in a torture procession. And so I came, smilingly, my back top‐heavy, and as I paraded gingerly down each stair, I had to dispel thoughts of losing my balance and toppling over headlong down the entire set to the ground miles below—board, tapes, twinkling stars and all …"

"I was at the studio at seven in the morning, putting on an evening gown, but I couldn't wait to get home to my children to be a nurse. What does Ava Gardner know? She never had a child, which is what it's all about. It's the truth!"

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

"More stairs, only this time it's in Samson and Delilah. Now, I'm ascending them, dragging poor, blinded Victor Mature by the handle of a whip. The set is as gigantically faint‐making as anything Mr. De Mille ever conceived, and every single extra within a 50 mile radius seems to be assembled as I slowly lead Samson to the top, where he is scheduled to pull the two enormous pillars of the temple down around his ears and everyone else's. And do you know what I am thinking as I watch this panoply on my television screen? Quite simply, it is "I can't take another step in those damn forties. high heels! … " And, again, in Samson, in the scene where I look dewy‐eyed while golden coins are poured over my feet as a reward for betraying Samson. Well, Mr. De Mille, whom I got along with beautifully, dragged me out of a sick bed for that one, and the dewy eyes are a direct result of a roaring 104‐degree fever."

"Property has its duties as well as its rights."

"The shot by [Andy] Bathgate nearly ripped my nose off. I told Toe [Blake] I would only return if I could wear the mask, so there was no choice. He never wanted me to wear the mask because he thought it would make me too complacent."

"Goaltending is a normal job, sure. How would you like it in your job if every time you made a small mistake, a red light went on over your desk and 15,000 people stood up and yelled at you?*"

"I was with the [Quebec] Citadelles. We had four defensemen. One couldn't skate backwards. Another couldn't turn to his left. The others were slow. It was a case of me having to go and get the puck when it was shot into our end because our defense couldn't get there fast enough. The more I did it, the farther I went. It seemed to be the best thing to do, so I did it and it worked." Plante continued, "Possession of the puck is number one. That's all I'm doing—getting control until one of my teammates comes along.""

"Hockey is an art. It requires speed, precision, and strength like other sports, but it also demands an extraordinary intelligence to develop a logical sequence of movements, a technique which is smooth, graceful and in rhythm with the rest of the game."

"My knees started to shake. In the dressing room that night, I was so nervous I couldn't tie my skates. Maurice Richard walked over and held out his hands. 'Look at them,' he said. 'They shake before a big game. You'll feel better when you get out on the ice.'"

"Our hockey team consisted of boys seventeen and eighteen years old and I used to watch them play all the time on the outdoor rink. On this one day, I remember it was very cold and I was looking at the game while standing indoors with my back against a stove. The goalie was having trouble and the coach accused him of not doing his best. The goalie was mad and took his skates off. I rushed toward the coach and volunteered to take his place. There was no other goalie around, so I went in the net and played with them the rest of the season."

"A ruler that has but an army has one hand, but he who has a navy has both."

"The history of the Romanovs is an Elizabethan tragedy that lasts for three centuries. Its keynote is cruelty, a barbaric, pointless kind of cruelty that has always been common in the East, but that came to Europe only recently, in the time of Hitler."

"Alas! I have civilized my own subjects; I have conquered other nations; yet I have not been able to civilize or to conquer myself."

"Here is the model which I intend to follow for the whole of my reign."

"After Westphalia brought peace to Europe, the second half of the seventeenth century saw a further spread of resident ambassadors, with Louis XIV’s France leading the way, and French replaced Latin as the lingua franca. There was, however, still scope for summitry, for instance during Peter the Great’s tour of Western Europe in 1697–8. His meetings with William III of England helped bring Russia belatedly into the European diplomatic orbit. In due course, the czar created a “Diplomatic Chancellery” and a network of foreign embassies on the European model."

"The more you get into material and matter, all you realize is in matter, there is energy. There is a blur between energy and consciousness. All material is conscious to some extent or another. All material can respond to some extent or another to vibrations of energy that is different to energy you learn about in physics. There are all sorts of reliable information now on people and animal being able to be able to effect the operations of machines—even of computers—and I think that has great implications for what goes on between a musician and his instrument. There is a level of reality where there is no time, and there is no space, there is just energy. And we have contact with that through the intermediate layers, so, if the right channels—if the right connections are established, I don’t see why a piece of matter, a piece of broken glass or and old record can’t make contact through this very high level of reality that has access to everything past and future. I suppose my instruments do retain some sort of memory of me. I know that when I’m working on them I feel (not explicitly, I don’t hear voices in my head or anything) that I’m making a connection with it. The circuit diagram, that is then converted into a circuit board, which then becomes a part of an instrument is something that is a record that I made. So I guess in that sense it is something that is certainly a memory."

"From your confessor, lawyer and physician, Hide not your case on no condition."

"Books give not wisdom where was none before, But where some is, there reading makes it more."

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

"Best fishing in troubled waters."

"I remember excitedly buying a boxed set of 4 books, Science in History by John D. Bernal (Pelican, 1965), when I was an undergraduate. At the time I was an amateur Marxist and Bernal’s work was an encyclopaedic analysis of science and society from a Marxist point of view. I was delighted to learn that Bernal was an Irishman who had spent a brilliant career at the leading edge of UK science, making many notable contributions."

"John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) was undoubtedly the most important of the "Western" scientists who, during the twentieth century, accepted the Marxist view of social development. He did more than "accept" it: he tried to sketch the whole history of science from a Marxist viewpoint; he wrote a number of articles explicitly expounding his view of the relation of Marxism to science; and from his student days he played an active role in Communist politics. He has been criticised: during his lifetime, for too readily accepting official Soviet policy, whether relating to society or to science; since his death, for having been too ready to hope that his vision of the use of science for human ends could be implemented by capitalist societies; and at all times, for an allegedly simplistic faith in science as the salvation of mankind."

"He idealized science not just as knowledge but in a political sense too, believing that the management of human affairs could also be more scientific by virtue of being socialist. He was thus particularly inclined to accept the claims of Soviet Marxism to represent science in general, and to accord it the same degree of respect."

"For Bernal the humanistic and the scientific dimensions were one. His vision of the sort of future that science could make possible for mankind was in total contrast to that of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Full automation, nuclear energy, and cybernetics could bring a fuller realisation of human potential. His futuristic sketches grew increasingly better grounded as his Marxism matured, making the society of the future set out in The Social Function of Science far more plausible than the one set out in his earlier work, The World, the Flesh and the Devil. His sense of history was sweeping, stretching back into the ancient past and shooting forward into the coming future."

"The extent of his faith in science can best be described as religious devotion. He comments himself: 'The same type of mind that would now make a physicist would in the Middle Ages have made a scholastic theologian.'"

"The theme which constantly recurs is the complex interaction between techniques, science, and philosophy. Science stands as a middle term between the established and transmitted practice of men who work for a living, and the pattern of ideas and traditions which assure the continuity of society and the rights and privileges of the classes that make it up."

"Science, in one aspect, is ordered technique; in another, it is rationalized mythology. Because it started as a hardly distinguishable aspect of the mystery of the craftsman and the lore of the priest... science was long in establishing any independent existence in society. Even when it did find its own... adepts in medicine, astrology, and alchemy, these formed, for many ages a small group parasitic on wealthy princes, clerics, and merchants. It is only in the last three centuries that science has become traditionally established as a profession in its own right, with its specific education, literature, and fellowship."

"[T]he centre of interest... lies in natural science and technology because... the sciences of society were first embodied in tradition and ritual and only took shape under the influence and on the model of the natural sciences."

"The progress in science has been anything but uniform in time and place. ...In the course of time the centres of scientific activity have been continually displaced, usually following rather than leading the migration of the centres of commercial and industrial activity. Babylonia, Egypt, and India have all been the foci of ancient science. Greece became their common heir, and there the rational basis... was first worked out. There was little place for science in Rome and none in the barbarian kingdoms of western Europe. The heritage of Greece returned to the East from whence it had come. In Syria, Persia, and India, even in... China, new breaths... came... in a brilliant synthesis under the banner of Islam. There they underwent a development which... was to give rise to... modern science."

"[T]radition links us with the revolutionary science of the Renaissance... we can distinguish... four major periods of advance. [1] [C]entred in Italy... the renewal of mechanics, anatomy, and astronomy with Leonardo, Vesalius, and Copernicus, destroying the authority of the Ancients in their central doctrines of man and the world. [2] [S]preading to the Low Countries, France, and Britain, beginning with Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes, and ending in Newton, hammered out a new mathematical mechanical model of the world. [3] [C]entred in industrial Britain and revolutionary Paris, opened... areas of experience... as... electricity... It was then that science could help... with power, machinery, and chemicals, to transform production and transport. [4] [T]he scientific revolution of our own time. ...[T]he beginning of a world science, transforming old and creating new industries, permeating every aspect of human life. ...[N]ow... we find science directly involved in the violent and terrible drama of wars and social revolution."

"[S]cience has so changed its nature over... human history that no definition could be made to fit."

"Never had Frederick Engels' famous notion of 'scientific socialism' been treated so literally."

"It would be as one-sided to assess the effects of science on society as of society on science."

"[T]o seek to discover how the advance of science had altered the whole frame of human thought, it would... be necessary to go back through the great controversies of the Renaissance about the Nature of the heavens, and... to the Ancients, without whose theories the controversies would have no meaning. There was nothing... but to attempt to trace the whole story from the... origins of human society. This involved a parallel study of all social and economic history in relation to the history of science... [T]here seemed some excuse for making a first attempt to sketch out the field, if only to stimulate, through... omissions and errors, others more leisured and qualified... No attempt is made here to present a chronologically uniform picture."

"World Encyclopaedia. -- Behind these lies another prospect of greater and more permanent importance; that of an attempt at a comprehensive and continually revised presentation of the whole of science in its social context, an idea most persuasively put forward by H. G. Wells in his appeal for a World Encyclopaedia of which he has already given us a foretaste in his celebrated outlines. The encyclopaedic movement was a great rallying point of the liberal revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The real encyclopaedia should not be what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has degenerated into, a mere mass of unrelated knowledge sold by high-pressure salesmanship, but a coherent expression of the living and changing body of thought; it should sum up what is for the moment the spirit of the age... The original French Encyclopaedia which did attempt these things was, however, made in the period of relative quiet when the forces of liberation were gathering ready to break their bonds. We have already entered the second period of revolutionary struggle and the quiet thought necessary to make such an effort will not be easy to find, but some effort is worth making because the combined assault on science and humanity by the forces of barbarism has against it, as yet, no general and coherent statement on the part of those who believe in democracy and the need for the people of the world to take over the active control of production and administration for their own safety and welfare."

"Science is one of the most absorbing and satisfying pastimes, and as such it appeals in different ways to different types of personality. To some it 1s a game against the unknown where one wins and no one loses, to others, more humanly minded, it is a race between different investigators as to who should first wrest the prize from nature. It has all the qualities which make millions of people addicts of the crossword puzzle or the detective story, the only difference being that the problem has been set by nature or chance and not by man, that the answers cannot be got with certainty, and when they are found often raise far more questions than the original problem."

"The problem of the re-organization of science will not be solved by administrative or financial changes. It will also be necessary to reorganise in a most comprehensive way the whole apparatus of scientific communication."

"In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues, and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal."

"Hogben's Science for the Citizen would be an admirable text-book for such teaching."

"[The goal of efficiency was] a system in which all relevant information would be available to each research worker in an amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance."

"It was my purpose to emphasize... to what extent the advance of natural science has helped to determine that of society... not only in economic changes... by the application of scientific discoveries, but... by the effect of the general frame of thought... [N]othing less would be adequate than a complete reevaluation of the reciprocal relations of science and society."

"If science were communism, was it also not possible that communism could itself become a science?"