Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating -- or toward the abyss.
"Shades of Lamarck", in The Panda's Thumb
Whatever you do, stamp out abuses, and love those who love you.
My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift ... if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.
"After all, did not Our Lord send a lowly earthworm to comfort Moses in his torment?"
"No."
Blackadder III: "Duel and Duality"
Today's pop counterculture, especially among the young, is an awesome mix of maximum mindlessness, minimum historical awareness, and a pathetic yearning for (to quote Chico Marx) strawberry shortcut. To hell with established religions, with science, with philosophy, with economics and politics, with the liberal arts -- with anything that demands time and effort.
Let's see ... If I were meta-agnostic, I'd be confused over whether I'm agnostic or not -- but I'm not quite sure if I feel that way; hence I must be meta-meta-agnostic (I guess). Oh, well.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
If you can do an experiment in one day, then in 10 days you can test 10 ideas, and maybe one of the 10 will be right. Then you've got it made.
A hundred astronomers have left parts of their souls and their hopes in drawings showing the surface of Mars. A score of men have left their stamp in the major theories about life on the strange planet fourth from the sun. The names of ten thousand technicians and scientists rest now on a plaque standing a few feet above the soil of Mars, attached to a spacecraft sent there in 1976. Fifty writers have tried their pen out on Mars and things Martian; sixty movie directors have tried to grasp the magic and mystery... I would like to show you how to fall in love with a planet.
If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.
You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.
You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything.
Said while answering questions after a lecture at Concordia University, Montreal
Time itself flows on with constant motion, just like a river: for no more than a river can the fleeting hour stand still. As wave is driven on by wave, and, itself pursued, pursues the one before, so the moments of time at once flee and follow, and are ever new.
The Metamorphoses
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
Underachiever -- and proud of it, man!
The Simpsons
"You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home.
Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.
I was not a child prodigy, because a child prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.
This example illustrates the differences in the effects which may be produced by research in pure or applied science. A research on the lines of applied science would doubtless have led to improvement and development of the older methods -- the research in pure science has given us an entirely new and much more powerful method. In fact, research in applied science leads to reforms, research in pure science leads to revolutions, and revolutions, whether political or industrial, are exceedingly profitable things if you are on the winning side.
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.
In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a nonworld.
If introductory physics were taught the way that introductory computer science seems to be taught, students would not see equational statements of Newton's Laws until their first semester of graduate school.
People who can't get laid watch Star Trek and eat Twinkies!
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it... He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature...
It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.
Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures.
I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
The farce is finished. I go to seek a vast perhaps.
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.
"Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature"
The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the games are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
With stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
Nature is beneficent. I praise her and all her works. She is silent and wise. She is cunning, but for good ends. She has brought me here and will also lead me away. She may scold me, but she will not hate her work. I trust her.
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them.
Physics is, hopefully, simple. Physicists are not.
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.
Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
If [in a rain forest] the traveler notices a particular species and wishes to find more like it, he must often turn his eyes in vain in every direction. Trees of varied forms, dimensions, and colors are around him, but he rarely sees any of them repeated. Time after time he goes towards a tree which looks like the one he seeks, but a closer examination proves it to be distinct.
Rule Number 1 is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule Number 2 is, it's all small stuff.
This person called up and said, "You've got to come and take this seminar. It will completely change your life in just one weekend." And I said, "Well, I don't want to completely change my life this weekend. I've got a lot of things to do on Monday."
A machine is as distinctively and brilliantly and expressively human as a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid.
I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
"Captain Future, Block That Kick!"
God looks after the stupid, the drunk, and the United States.
... Sir Isaac Newton... is in every Englishman's wallet... he's on the English one-pound note. I always carry one on me for good luck. A man who discovered gravity and thus successfully secured our feet on the ground is a good companion.
The Belly of an Architect
Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
I once asked a Christmas Eve group of children if they believed in Santa Claus. The very smallest ones answered without hesitation, "Why, of course!" The older ones shook their heads. The little girls smiled but said nothing. One future scientist asserted boldly "I know who it is"; and a little make-strong with his eye on gain said: "I believe in it all; I can believe in anything." That boy, I realized, would one day be a bishop.