Great Throughts Treasury

"No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Since the universe must contain millions of appropriate planets, consciousness in some form - but not with the paired eyes and limbs, and the brain built of neurons in the only example we know - may evolve frequently. But if only one origin of life in a million ever leads to consciousness, then Martian bacteria most emphatically do not imply Little Green Men.)" - Stephan Jay Gould

"The anatomical transition from reptiles to mammals is particularly well documented in the key anatomical change of jaw articulation to hearing bones. Only one bone, called the dentary, builds the mammalian jaw, while reptiles retain several small bones in the rear portion of the jaw. We can trace, through a lovely sequence of intermediates, the reduction of these small reptilian bones, and their eventual disappearance or exclusion from the jaw, including the remarkable passage of the reptilian articulation bones into the mammalian middle ear (where they became our malleus and incus, or hammer and anvil). We have even found the transitional form that creationists often proclaim inconceivable in theory — for how can jawbones become ear bones if intermediaries must live with an unhinged jaw before the new joint forms? The transitional species maintains a double jaw joint, with both the old articulation of reptiles (quadrate to articular bones) and the new connection of mammals (squamosal to dentary) already in place! Thus, one joint could be lost, with passage of its bones into the ear, while the other articulation continued to guarantee a properly hinged jaw. Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of all transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found, and continuing to taunt us with admittedly frequent examples of absence." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The telephone is the greatest single enemy of scholarship; for what our intellectual forebears used to inscribe in ink now goes once over a wire into permanent oblivion." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus, or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality)." - Stephan Jay Gould

"The busier and thingier my life gets, the more my understanding - in the sense of compassion as well as that of knowledge - is diminished." - Stephanie Mills

"A high proportion of space scientists say their interest in science was sparked by watching the moon landings." - Stephen Hawking

"A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing the universe is not as simple as we might have thought." - Stephen Hawking

"As I shall describe, the prospects for finding such a theory seem to be much better now because we know so much more about the universe. But we must beware of overconfidence - we have had false dawns before! At the beginning of this century, for example, it was thought that everything could be explained in terms of the properties of continuous matter, such as elasticity and heat conduction. The discovery of atomic structure and the uncertainty principle put an emphatic end to that. Then again, in 1928, physicist and Nobel Prize winner Max Born told a group of visitors to Gottingen University, Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months. His confidence was based on the recent discovery by Dirac of the equation that governed the electron. It was thought that a similar equation would govern the proton, which was the only other particle known at the time, and that would be the end of theoretical physics. However, the discovery of the neutron and of nuclear forces knocked that one on the head too. Having said this, I still believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature." - Stephen Hawking

"Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in." - Stephen Hawking

"I’m the archetype of a disabled genius, or should I say a physically challenged genius, to be politically correct. At least I’m obviously physically challenged. Whether I’m a genius is more open to doubt." - Stephen Hawking

"If you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away." - Stephen Hawking

"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?" - Stephen Hawking

"In the history of science we have discovered a sequence of better and better theories or models, from Plato to the classical theory of Newton to modern quantum theories. It is natural to ask: Will this sequence eventually reach an end point, an ultimate theory of the universe, that will include all forces and predict every observation we can make, or will we continue forever finding better theories, but never one that cannot be improved upon?" - Stephen Hawking

"In the Universe it may be that Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth." - Stephen Hawking

"Quiet people have the loudest minds." - Stephen Hawking

"The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: 'The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE." - Stephen Hawking

"The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions." - Stephen Hawking

"The realization that I had an incurable disease, that was likely to kill me in a few years, was a bit of a shock. How could something like that happen to me? Why should I be cut off like this? However while I had been in hospital, I had seen a boy I vaguely knew die of leukemia in the bed opposite me. It had not been a pretty sight. Clearly there were people who were worse off than I. At least, my condition didn’t make me feel sick. Whenever I feel inclined to be sorry for myself, I remember that boy." - Stephen Hawking

"The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceived ideas. It continues to surprise us." - Stephen Hawking

"The universe would have expanded in a smooth way from a single point. As it expanded, it would have borrowed energy from the gravitational field, to create matter. As any economist could have predicted, the result of all that borrowing, was inflation. The universe expanded and borrowed at an ever-increasing rate. Fortunately, the debt of gravitational energy will not have to be repaid until the end of the universe." - Stephen Hawking

"The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope." - Stephen Hawking

"The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological—technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century." - Stephen Hawking

"There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average" - Stephen Hawking

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," - Stephen Hawking

"What is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?" - Stephen Hawking

"And at the lowest level what I expect is that even though the rules being applied are perfectly definite, the overall pattern of connections that will exist in the network corresponding to our universe will continually be rearranged in ways complicated enough to seem effectively random. Yet on a slightly larger scale such randomness will then lead to a certain average uniformity. And it is then essentially this that I believe is responsible for maintaining something like ordinary space - with gradual variations giving rise to the phenomenon of gravity. But superimposed on this effectively random background will then presumably also be some de some definite structures that persist through many updatings of the network. And it is these, I believe, that are what correspond to particles like electrons." - Stephen Wolfram

"It took me more than a decade to come to terms with this result [that simple computer programs can produce complex behavior], and to realize just how fundamental and far-reaching its consequences are. In retrospect there is no reason the result could not have been found centuries ago, but increasingly I have come to view it as one of the more important single discoveries in the whole history of theoretical science. For in addition to opening up vast new domains of exploration, it implies a radical rethinking of how processes in nature and elsewhere work." - Stephen Wolfram

"The thing that got me started on the science that I've been building now for about 20 years or so was the question of okay, if mathematical equations can't make progress in understanding complex phenomena in the natural world, how might we make progress?" - Stephen Wolfram

"There are a few very small incompatible changes - I really doubt most people will ever run into them." - Stephen Wolfram

"You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations." - Stephen Wolfram

"And I recall a conversation with Sir Henry Irving one night when he said to me, “Fetch me a glass of water, will you?” and I said, “Sir Henry, it is not only a pleasure to get it but it is to me, as a humble devotee of the art that you have ennobled, a high privilege. I will go further—” “Do,” he said. Henry was like that, quick, sympathetic, what we call in French “vibrant.”" - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"Naturally, too, I was brought into contact, very often into quite intimate personal contact, with some of the greatest actors of the day. I don’t say it in any way of boasting, but merely because to those of us who love the stage all dramatic souvenirs are interesting. I remember, for example, that when Wilson Barrett played “The Bat” and had to wear the queer suit with the scales, it was I who put the glue on him." - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock

"Everything gives way to money, and money gives way to nothing, neither to man nor to God." - Theodore Parker

"Politics is the science of urgencies." - Theodore Parker

"Remorse is the pain of sin." - Theodore Parker

"The search for a community reality takes the form of a massive rescue operation. I think this is the great adventure of our time, infinitely more valuable to man than the conquest of space. It represents the return and revival of ancient Gnosticism. For those who answer the call, what happens in the world of science, despite its place in politics still considerable governmental lose more existential sense. In their eyes, and many scientists will émoules archaic figure of clergy, liturgy professional absurd, busy exchanging knowledge, supposedly available to the public in the secret sanctuary of their church from the state." - Theodore Roszak

"What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"As the quality of water changes with the nature of the soil; so will a man's reason vary with the quality of his friends." - Thiruvalluvar NULL

"Many exhaust their spirits in reading romances, and their minds pursue them, as the flame does the dry stubble; while they have no heart for, nor relish to, the holy word; and therefore seldom take a Bible in their hands. What is agreeable to the vanity of their minds is pleasant and exciting; but what recommends holiness to their unholy hearts, makes their spirits dull and flat. What pleasure they find in reading a profane ballad, or story-book, to whom the Bible is entirely tasteless! Many lay by their Bibles with their sabbath-day's clothes; and whatever use they have for their clothes, they have none for their Bibles, until the return of the Sabbath." - Thomas Boston

"Tell us, ye men who are so jealous of right and of honor, who take sudden fire at every insult, and suffer the slightest imagination of another’s contempt, or another’s unfairness, to chase from your bosom every feeling of complacency; ye men whom every fancied affront puts in such a turbulence of emotion, and in whom every fancied infringement stirs up the quick and the resentful appetite for justice, how will you stand the rigorous application of that test by which the forgiven of God are ascertained, even that the spirit of forgiveness is in them, and by which it will be pronounced whether you are, indeed, the children of the Highest, and perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect?" - Thomas Chalmers

"'Tis not a soldier's glory to tell how many lives he has ended, but how many he has saved." - Thomas Dekker

"I have four good reasons for being an abstainer—my head is clearer, my health is better, my heart is lighter, and my purse is heavier." - Thomas Guthrie

"What do you think of it, Moon, As you go? Is life much or no?' 'O, I think of it, often think of it As a show God ought surely to shut up soon, As I go." - Thomas Hardy

"Competition of riches, honour, command, or other power, inclineth to contention, enmity, and war: because the way of one competitor, to the attaining of his desire, is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repel the other." - Thomas Hobbes