Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Mary Wortley Montagu

A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation.

Marshall McLuhan

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

Marshall McLuhan

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Marshall McLuhan

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

Marshall McLuhan

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Marshall McLuhan

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

Paul Auster

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

Paul Auster

In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.

Newt Gingrich

It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.

Noam Chomsky

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.

Martin Heidegger

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

Mario Puzo

It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

Mary McCarthy

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mark Twain

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.

Mark Twain

Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.

Mark Twain

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

Oscar Wilde

It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

Lucretius

See with what force yon river's crystal stream Resists the weight of many a massy beam. To sink the wood the more we vainly toil, The higher it rebounds, with swift recoil. Yet that the beam would of itself ascend No man will rashly venture to contend. Thus too the flame has weight, though highly rare, Nor mounts but when compelled by heavier air.

Lucretius

Anything made out of destructible matter Infinite time would have devoured before. But if the atoms that make and replenish the world Have endured through the immense span of the past Their natures are immortal-that is clear. Never can things revert to nothingness!

Louis Kronenberger

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

Louis Kronenberger

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

Michael Crichton

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science.

Michael Crichton

Everyone has a hidden agenda. Except me!

Michael Crichton

God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.

Michael Crichton

That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.

Michael Crichton

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

Michel de Montaigne

It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.

Miguel de Unamuno

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

Miguel de Unamuno

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

Miguel de Unamuno

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

Neil Armstrong

The [Moon] surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.