James Bryant Conant
James Bryant Conant
James Bryant Conantwas an American chemist, a transformative President of Harvard University, and the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Conant obtained a PhD in Chemistry from Harvard in 1916. During World War I he served in the U.S. Army, working on the development of poison gases. He became an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard in 1919, and the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1929. He researched the physical structures of natural products, particularly chlorophyll, and he...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth26 March 1893
CountryUnited States of America
James Bryant Conant quotes about
Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface.
Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.
He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.
In every section of the entire area where the word science may properly be applied, the limiting factor is a human one. We shall have rapid or slow advance in this direction or in that depending on the number of really first-class men who are engaged in the work in question. ... So in the last analysis, the future of science in this country will be determined by our basic educational policy.
The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.
Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. . . . There will always be the false snobbery which tries to place one vocation above another. You will become a member of the aristocracy in the American sense only if your accomplishments and integrity earn this appellation.
Public education is a great instrument of social change. Through it, if we so desire, we can make our country more nearly a democracy without classes. To do so will require the efforts of us all-teachers, administrators, taxpayers and statesmen. Education is a social process, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today.
Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.
There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science-that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.
Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.
It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.
Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.
Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.
Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.