Great Throughts Treasury

"The irony here is this administration is spending more money on climate change research and development than any administration in all the rest of the industrialized world combined." - Christine Todd Whitman, aka "Christie"

"The Republican Party has never been this narrow, litmus-test type party. We can disagree on an issue like choice or stem cell research and not be an enemy or a bad person. We need to get away from this approach that we see more and more today, that you can't be a good Republican if you don't believe certain things in a certain way." - Christine Todd Whitman, aka "Christie"

"My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships." - Carol Gilligan

"In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski

"A 2004 study found that teens who watch a lot of television with sexual content and more likely to initiate intercourse in the following year. Overexposure to highly-sexed television made kids act older--12-year-olds behaved like 14-year-olds. A decade of new research confirms that heavy exposure to violent and sexually explicit media triggers unhealthy responses from boys and girls alike, regardless of race. But we don't yet know the full effects of all this technology on our kids. CAMRA, the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, which I introduced in the Senate, would coordinate and fund new research into the effects of viewing and using electronic media, including television, computers, video games, and the Internet…" - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"In the last few years, we've seen major breakthroughs in research and effectiveness of contraceptives. For example, Plan B is a new emergency contraceptive that can prevent a pregnancy after another contraceptive has failed or after unprotected sex. I fought for years to get Plan B on the market, so that fewer women will face the choice of abortion. It is now available for over-the-counter use by adult women. I have proposed Prevention First, a bill that focuses on prevention of unwanted pregnancies through comprehensive education, emphasizing responsible decision-making and expanded access to contraception. With these efforts, it's my hope that the abortion rate will fall further." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"New research in childhood development establishes that a child's environment affects everything from IW to future behavior patterns. These studies confirm the importance of breast-feeding infants, of setting aside time for family meals, and of empowering parents to shield their children from predatory marketing and the violent and sexually explicit media that contribute to aggressive behavior, early sexual experimentation, obesity, and depression. The case for quality early childhood education and programs like Head Start is stronger than ever, and we should expand them. According to a study conducted by Federal Reserve economist Rob Grunewald and conducted by Nobel laureate economist James Heckman, high-quality preschool programs are among the most cost-effective public investments we make, lowering dependency and raising lifetime earnings." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"It is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive." - Albert Einstein

"Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people." - Albert Einstein

"It is clear according to what we have said that these (doctrines) do not only lead to dogmatic relativism, but already contain it in act; the contempt of the doctrine commonly taught and of the terms in which it expressed itself are already too close to it... .The expressions that, during the course of several centuries, were established by a common consent of Catholic doctors in order to arrive at some understanding of dogma surely do not rest on such a fragile foundation. They rest, in fact, on principles and notions taken from the true knowledge of created things; in the research of these notions revealed truth enlightened the human mind like a star by means of the Church. That is why it is not surprising that some of these notions have not only been used in ecumenical Councils but have received such a sanction that it is not permitted to distance oneself from them. Thus it is very imprudent to substitute for them fl oating and vague notions and expressions of a new philosophy that are used today and will disappear tomorrow like the fl owers of the fi eld; this would be to make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind. In fact, unfortunately these lovers of novelty easily pass from contempt of Scholastic theology to a lack of respect for and even contempt of the magisterium of the Church which has so strongly supported this theology by its authority." - Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, fully Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange

"I know you're smart. But everyone here is smart. Smart isn't enough. The kind of people I want on my research team are those who will help everyone feel happy to be here." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch

"I do a great deal of research - particularly in the apartments of tall blondes." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"Good science is more than the mechanics of research and experimentation. Good science requires that scientists look inward--to contemplate the origin of their thoughts. The failures of science do not begin with flawed evidence or fumbled statistics; they begin with personal self-deception and an unjustified sense of knowing." - Robert Burton

"We encourage people to use microfilm when that will be sufficient for their research purposes. We want to preserve (the bound volumes) for purposes that demand some aspect of utilizing the original format." - Robert Byrd, fully Robert Carlyle Byrd

"16 Rules for Investment Success - Invest — don’t trade or speculate. “The stock market is not a casino, but if you move in and out of stocks every time they move a point or two…the market will be your casino.” Remain flexible and open-minded about types of investment. “There are times to buy blue chip stocks, cyclical stocks, corporate bonds, U.S. Treasury instruments, and so on. And there are times to sit on cash…The fact is there is no one kind of investment that is always best.” Buy low. “It is extremely difficult to go against the crowd — to buy when everyone else is selling or has sold, to buy when things look darkest…[but] chances are if you buy what everyone is buying you will do so only after it is already overpriced.” When buying stocks, search for bargains among quality stocks. “Determining quality in a stock is like reviewing a restaurant. You don’t expect it to be 100% perfect, but before it gets three or four stars you want it to be superior.” Diversify. “In stocks and bonds, as in much else, there is safety in numbers.” Do your homework or hire wise experts to help you. “People will tell you: Investigate before you invest. Listen to them. Study companies to learn what makes them successful.” Don’t panic. “The time to sell is before the crash, not after.” Learn from your mistakes. “The only way to avoid mistakes is not to invest — which is the biggest mistake of all…The big difference between those who are successful and those who are not is that successful people learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others.” An investor who has all the answers doesn’t even understand all the questions. “A cocksure approach to investing will lead, probably sooner than later, to disappointment if not outright disaster. Even if we can identify an unchanging handful of investing principles, we cannot apply these rules to an unchanging universe of investments—or an unchanging economic and political environment. Everything is in a constant state of change, and the wise investor recognizes that success is a process of continually seeking answers to new questions.” Do not be fearful or negative too often. “Even in the dark ’70s, many professional money managers — and many individual investors too — made money in stocks, especially those of smaller companies. There will, of course, be corrections, perhaps even crashes. But, over time, our studies indicate stocks do go up…and up…and up.”" - John Templeton, fully Sir John Marks Templeton

"In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater — unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters." - Simone Weil

"What should the fossil record include if most evolution occurs by speciation in peripheral isolates? Species should be static through their range because our fossils are the remains of large central populations. In any local area inhabited by ancestors, a descendant species should appear suddenly by migration from the peripheral region in which it evolved. In the peripheral region itself, we might find direct evidence of speciation, but such good fortune would be rare indeed because the event occurs so rapidly in such a small population. Thus, the fossil record is a faithful rendering of what evolutionary theory predicts, not a pitiful vestige of a once bountiful tale." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Dreaming is perception unconstrained by sensory input. And vice versa, what is perception is what we’re doing right now; dreaming, constrained by sensory input." - Stephen LaBerge

"But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill-usage." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"I find the religious diversity of the world almost bewilderingly complex. The more I study, the more variegated I find the religious scene to be. I have no reason to urge a thesis of unity among 'the religions of the world'. As a matter of fact, I do not find unity even within one so-called 'religion', let alone among all.... It is not the case that all religions are the same. The historian notes that not even one religion is the same, century after century, or from one country to another, or from village to city.... I repeat: it is not the case that all religions are the same. Moreover, if a philosopher asks (anhistorically) what they all have in common, he or she either finds the answer to be 'nothing', or finds that they all have in common something so much less than each has separately as to distort or to evacuate the individual richness and depth and sometimes grotesqueness of actual religious life." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith

"We are living at a time when it is absolutely es­sential to make a clean cut distinction between the magical attitude and the religious attitude in life. We have today as men never dreamed of having in other days, coercive control over tremendous forces in the natural world. We make daily trial of these forces, we “tempt” them, and they obey. We press the button, and throw the switch, and spin the dial, and step on the accelerator and the gods of all mythology touch their caps in deferential obedience to our slightest whim. The applied sciences of the twentieth century do make magicians of us all. It should be said at once that the pure scientist stands absolutely free of the charge of practicing magic. The affinities of pure science are with re­ligion, in that its reference is not from the universe to man’s uses, but from man to the realities of his universe. But the pure scientist is as rare a creature in our world as the pure saint. The vulgar modern heresy that society is made up of a large number of very pure scientists and an equally large number of very impure Christians is simply grotesque. Once in a while this world sees men like Saint Francis, John Woolman, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday; once in a great while. But the pure scientist is as much an exception in a university laboratory as the pure saint is an exception in a sectarian meeting house. For the most part we have at hand a society of persons practicing variously in the names of re­ligion and science a self-willed, uncritical, and arro­gant attempt to make the ultimate forces give them what they severally desire. And this temptation of the Lord their God is neither science nor religion in the noblest meaning of those words." - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry

"The things of the world are ever rising and falling, and in perpetual change; and this change must be according to the will of God, as He has bestowed upon man neither the wisdom nor the power to enable him to check it. The great lesson in these things is, that man must strengthen himself doubly at such times to fulfill his duty and to do what is right, and must seek his happiness and inward peace from objects which cannot be taken away from him." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"The laws of thermodynamics, as empirically determined, express the approximate and probable behavior of systems of a great number of particles, or, more precisely, they express the laws of mechanics for such systems as they appear to beings who have not the fineness of perception to enable them to appreciate quantities of the order of magnitude of those which relate to single particles, and who cannot repeat their experiments often enough to obtain any but the most probable results." - Willard Gibbs, fully Josiah Willard Gibbs

"The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg

"Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?" - Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun

"The plough destroyed more options for future generations than the automobile." - Wes Jackson

"I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life." - Wilhelm Reich

"The question of how and why the encrustations and rigidifications of human emotional life are brought about led directly into the realm of vegetative life." - Wilhelm Reich

"If anyone can do this thing well, then I too have that capacity." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The power of intention manifests as an expression of expanding creativity, kindness, love, and beauty." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"We can go a stage beyond talking about things and drawing pictures of things by arranging for the actual handling of things. There is evidence that this greatly increases the proportion of the population capable of learning mathematics and this evidence is on a mass scale." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"There's just this… an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world." - Vannevar Bush

"The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge — and for most of its application — rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it." - Vannevar Bush

"In its influence on the soul, error has been compared to a magnet concealed near the ship's compass. - As in the latter case, the more favorable the winds, and the greater the diligence and skill in working the ship, the more rapidly will it be speeded on in a wrong course; and so in the former, the greater the struggle for safety, the more speedy the progress to ruin." - Tryon Edwards

"I wanted to scientize myth and mythologize science." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary

"The more things for which you develop a fondness the richer the life you live." - Dan Buettner

"Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"24 hour broadcasts have to stretch limited material to fit 24 hours’ worth of space." - Drew Curtis

"Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning." - Albert Einstein

"Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility." - Ernest Becker

"No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The point is that the real strength of the theory of private enterprise lies in this ruthless simplification, which fits so admirably also into the mental patterns created by the phenomenal successes of science." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make doing each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I have not found it." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken