Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer (3 page)
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
Explaining why he declined President Kennedy's invitation to dinner with forty-nine Nobel laureates
Alfred Nobel's will directed that the prizes be awarded to persons "who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." This humanitarian ethos has been maintained by the Nobel selection committees. While Nobel laureates represent all shades of political, religious, and social belief, idealism and humanitarianism are general characteristics.
Few laureates could be described as extremist in their beliefs. Only a minuscule number have at any time been doctrinaire communists or fascists. A minority are passionate in their religious belief, a similar minority in their atheism. Insofar as Nobel laureates share a set of beliefs, these would be belief in their work, in the welfare of humanity, in freedom, and in the search for truth.
58. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible, and those who believe that "belief" must be discarded and replaced by "the scientific method."
Max Born
PHYSICS, 1954
59. Someone who believes everything he is told simply can't be a scientist, but someone who believes nothing will wind up in jail or prematurely buried.
Luis Alvarez
PHYSICS, 1968
60. I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
William Golding
LITERATURE, 198 3
61. Human beings . . . are far too prone to generalize from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition.
Francis Crick
MEDICINE, 1962
62. I certainly do not believe in this superstition. But you know, they say it does bring luck even if you don't believe in it!
Niels Bohr
PHYSICS, 1922
In answer to a visitor's question about the horseshoe above the door of his country cottage
63. I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
64. I believe in God—in spite of God! I believe in Mankind— in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future—in spite of the Past!
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
65. What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.
Francois Jacob
MEDICINE, 1965
66. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
67. I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I've got.
Hermann Hesse
LITERATURE, 1946
68. The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
Niels Bohr
PHYSICS, 1922
69. Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
70. I have one life and one chance to make it count for something . . . My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
71. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.
Jacques Monod
MEDICINE, 1965
72. In roadside ditches, in washed-out trenches, among the ruins of burned houses, he learned the value of a can of soup, an hour of quiet, the meaning of true friendship, of life itself.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970
73. The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer
LITERATURE, 1991
74. With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive.
Gao Xingjian
LITERATURE, 2000
75. Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide
LITERATURE, 1947
76. Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.
Romain Rolland
LITERATURE, 1915
77
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Science has nothing to do with any dogma. Science ceases to exist when there is a dogma.
Jean-Marie Lehn
CHEMISTRY, 198 7
78. It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Anatole France
LITERATURE, 1921
79. I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science . . . This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.
Max Born
PHYSICS, 1954
80. Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
81. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr
PHYSICS, 1922
82. No deep truth has ever been shouted.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
LITERATURE, 1956
83. A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.
Saul Bellow
LITERATURE, 1976
84. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 194 8
85. Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.
Nadine Gordimer
LITERATURE, 1991
86. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
Czeslaw Milosz
LITERATURE, 1980
87. A person obsessed with ultimate truth is a person asking to be relieved of money.
Robert Laughlin
PHYSICS, 1998
88. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970
89. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true, and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
90. The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
V. S. Naipaul
LITERATURE, 2001
91. In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.
Cordell Hull
PEACE, 1945
To the Japanese ambassador, who brought a note to Secretary of State Hull immediately after Pearl Harbor, December 7,1941
92. Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
Czeslaw Milosz
LITERATURE, 1980
93. As I was standing in the drawing-room at Trinity, a clergyman came in. And I said to him: "I'm Lord Rutherford." And he said to me, "I'm the Archbishop of York." And I don't suppose either of us believed the other.
Ernest Rutherford
CHEMISTRY, 190 8
94. I'm enough of an academic to believe that ideas are even more powerful than nuclear weapons.
John Polanyi
CHEMISTRY, 198 6
95. For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
96. As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that everyone thinks him silly, so that he remains obscure and is soon forgotten. Then, gradually, the world becomes ready for his idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
97. How do you get good ideas? You have a lot of ideas and throw out the bad ones.
Linus Pauling
CHEMISTRY, 1954; PEACE, 1962
98. Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962
99. The only way I can tell that a new idea is really important is the feeling of terror that seizes me.
James Franck
PHYSICS, 1925
100. I distrust scientists who complain about others stealing their ideas—I have always had to force new ideas down people's throats.
Max Perutz
CHEMISTRY, 1962
101. There's a saying among scientists, that you don't know you've got a really good idea until at least three Nobel laureates have told you it's wrong.
Paul Lauterbur
MEDICINE, 2003
102. No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
Frederick Banting
MEDICINE, 1923
103. You must begin with an ideal and end with an ideal.
Frederick Banting
MEDICINE, 1923
104. Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
John Galsworthy
LITERATURE, 1932
105. Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
106. We are not asked to subscribe to any Utopia or to believe in a perfect world. We are asked to equip ourselves with courage, hope, readiness for hard work and to cherish large and generous ideals.
Emily Balch
PEACE, 1946
107. They call us romantics, weak, stupid, sentimental idealists, perhaps because we have some faith in the good which exists even in our opponents and because we believe that kindness achieves more than cruelty.