Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard P. Feynman

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Richard P. Feynman

Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.

Richard P. Feynman

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Richard P. Feynman

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

Richard P. Feynman

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. ... If you will simply admit that maybe [Nature] does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Richard P. Feynman

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

Richard Dawkins

Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.

Richard Whately

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

Carolyn Brown

I think the ACLU may be able to support the law here in Kansas. It is being written in a way that does not take away the right to assemble.

John Goodwin

Law enforcement authorities have been after him for a long time.

Fred Walker

I don't know because there's no law pertaining to this in Crawford County,

Howard Safir

He is in my view the perfect law enforcement officer,

Dick DeGuerin

He looks at the law and he sees what he wants to see, and he prosecutes what he thinks ought to be prosecuted, rather than what it is.

Richard Perle

Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies.

Richard P. Feynman

We can deduce, often, from one part of physics like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation.

Richard P. Feynman

One cannot understand... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.

Richard P. Feynman

Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.

Norman O. Brown

The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation.

Marcus Aurelius

Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet .

Nell Minow

They got the words right and the substance wrong, ... I'm very disappointed.

Diane Wakoski

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

Edith Wharton

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

Barry Commoner

In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.

George Berkeley

I do not deny the existence of material substance merely because I have no notion of it, but because the notion of it is inconsistent, or in other words, because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it.

Jack Kerouac

There is universal substance which is divine substance because where else can it be?

Jacques Barzun

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.