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.

William J. Brennan

The framers knew that liberty is a fragile thing, and so should we.

William J. Clinton

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.

Will Durant

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

Will Durant

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

Robert Nozick

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Samuel West

Where licentiousness begins, liberty ends.

Vincent Bugliosi

The media assume that if your life or liberty is on the line and you have a lot of money, you automatically get the best.

William Cowper

When was public virtue to be found when private was not?

Sarah Fielding

But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.

Woodrow Wilson

Only peace between equals can last.

William Blake

Enthusiastic Admiration is the first Principle of Knowledge and its last.

Vladimir Nabokov

for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.

Jackie Williams

Recovery is a miracle. It lasts for a life time.

Chasity Rutjens

I just want to make sure it lasts me the rest of my life so I don't have to return to work.

Joseph Barber Lightfoot

God is the last link of the chain, but He is the first also.

Jonathan Tropper

What it must feel like, I thought, to look at something, anything really, and know that it’s for the last time?

Kenneth H. Cooper

According to the Gallup Poll, 24 percent of American adults exercised regularly in 1961, and 50 percent after 1968. The peak was 59 percent in 1984, dropping off to 51 percent last September.

Kelley Armstrong

I've spent the last decade learning to stand firm and face my problems… or at least batter them until they're unrecognizable.