Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Harvey Kellogg

Alcoholism, the opium habit and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation; the grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its strangle-hold and more than one hundred million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god.

John Harvey Kellogg

Tobacco, in its various forms, is one of the most mischievous of all drugs. There is perhaps no other drug which injures the body in so many ways and so universally as does tobacco. Some drugs offer a small degree of compensation for the evil effects which they produce; but tobacco has not a single redeeming feature and gives nothing in return.

John Harvey Kellogg

All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.

John Harvey Kellogg

Tobacco has not yet been fully tried before the bar of science. But the tribunal has been prepared and the gathering of evidence has begun and when the final verdict is rendered, it will appear that tobacco is evil and only evil; that as a drug it is far more deadly than alcohol, killing in a dose a thousand times smaller, and that it does not possess a single one of the quasi merits of alcohol.

Sheri S. Tepper

Science fiction still is an idea genre.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

A television advertisement must illustrate the scientific method to substantiate any claim.... That is why stains are lifted, ring-around-the-collar is removed, paper towels become soaked, excess stomach acid is absorbed, and headaches go away-all during the commercial.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

We fail in even the simplest of all scientific observations-nobody looks up anymore.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

And I don't care what else anyone has ever told you, the Sun is white, not yellow. Human color perception is a complicated business, but if the Sun were yellow, like a yellow lightbulb, then white stuff such as snow would reflect this light and appear yellow-a snow condition confirmed to happen only near fire hydrants.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

There is a theorem that colloquially translates, You cannot comb the hair on a bowling ball. ... Clearly, none of these mathematicians had Afros, because to comb an Afro is to pick it straight away from the scalp. If bowling balls had Afros, then yes, they could be combed without violation of mathematical theorems.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

He invited people to sign a petition that demanded either strict control of, or a total ban on, dihydrogen monoxide.... Yes, 86 percent of the passersby voted to ban water (H2O) from the environment. Maybe that's what really happened to all the water on Mars.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

People like it when they understand something that they previously thought they couldn't understand. It's a sense of empowerment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The past is another planet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Scientists are human. We have our blind spots and prejudices. Science is a mechanism designed to ferret them out. Problem is we aren't always faithful to the core values of science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Note, however, that you cannot simply add temperatures the way you can add volumes or weights. Two people in bed, each with body temperatures of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, do not normally create a 197.2 degree under-the-cover oven.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The telescope... is a conduit to the cosmos.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

There are photons that have been traveling for 30,000 years, and I'm... snatching them from this journey and planting them into my digital detector. And then I started feeling bad for the photon, and I said maybe it wanted to continue but I got in its way. But then I said, no, those are probably happier photons than the one that slammed into the mountainside that will go unanalyzed and will not contribute to the depth of our understanding of the universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Photons are accurately and legitimately described as waves and particles at the same time. They are genuine wavicles.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

UV is bad for molecules because its high energy breaks the bonds between a molecule's constituent atoms. That's why UV is bad for you, too: it's always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

A common way to compute density is, of course, to take the ratio of an object's mass to its volume. But other types of densities exist, such as the resistance of somebody's brain to the imparting of common sense....

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Deep in the world of atomic nuclei, life is not always tranquil.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

You can make a stack high enough to reach the moon and back, and only then will you have used your 100 billion hamburgers. This is terrifying news to cows.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

While the Copernican principle comes with no guarantees that it will forever guide us to cosmic truths, it's worked quite well so far: not only is Earth not in the center of the solar system, but the solar system is not in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy is not in the center of the universe, and it may come to pass that our universe is just one of many that comprise a multiverse. And in case you're one of those people who thinks that the edge may be a special place, we are not at the edge of anything either.

John Wilkins

'Tis certain that our senses are extremely disproportioned for comprehending the whole compass and latitude of things.

John von Neumann

Neumann, to a physicist seeking help with a difficult problem: Simple. This can be solved by using the method of characteristics. Physicist: I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics. Neumann: In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

John Steinbeck

The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.

John Searle

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

Tobias Smollett

A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.

Socrates

The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift.