Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer (4 page)
Fridtjof Nansen
PEACE, 1922
108. The ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
109. One of the important distinctions between
ideology
and
science
is that science recognizes the limitations on what one knows.
Joseph Stiglitz
ECONOMICS, 2001
110. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970
111. I don't know whose crime is worse, the establishment intellectual or the intellectual who trots out ideological dogma.
Wole Soyinka
LITERATURE, 1986
112. Bid farewell to ideologies and instead return to the truth of being human.
Gao Xingjian
LITERATURE, 2000
113. Now that the cruel Utopias that bloodied our century have vanished, the time has come at last to begin a radical, more human reform of liberal capitalist society.
Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990
114. After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and—above all—its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything—and everyone—is fair game.
Giinter Grass
LITERATURE, 1999
115. Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
Thomas Mann
LITERATURE, 1929
116. Any anti-Communist is a dog.
Jean-Paul Sartre
LITERATURE, 1964
117. By "radical," I understand one who goes too far; by "conservative," one who does not go far enough; by "reactionary," one who won't go at all.
Woodrow Wilson
PEACE, 1919
118. It is time to fight the fashionable notion that self-fulfilment, the development of one's personality and fulfilment of one's wishes at no matter what cost to one's family, friends, colleagues, and community, should be man's or woman's ultimate aim.
Max Perutz
CHEMISTRY, 1962
119. Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them.
T. S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948
120. Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
Eugene O'Neill
LITERATURE, 1936
121. I think only an idiot can be an atheist.
Christian Anfinsen
CHEMISTRY, 1972
122. I was merely an electrician and the only things I had were my belief in God, and my belief in what I was doing.
Lech Walesa
PEACE, 1983
123. We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
John Eccles
MEDICINE, 1963
124. We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
T S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 194 8
125. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
126. Religion is very different from science . . . When you play the piano, when you climb a mountain, does this contradict your scientific endeavors? . . . In science we have certain ways of thinking about the world, and in religion we have different ways of thinking about the world. Those two things coexist side by side without conflict.
Robert Aumann
ECONOMICS, 2005
127. Wherever we may look, far and wide, we nowhere find a contradiction between religion and natural science. Quite the contrary, precisely on the decisive points we find complete agreement.
Otto Hahn
CHEMISTRY, 1944
128. I do not believe that anyone should ever say that science agrees with religion. What I would say, which I think is a far more powerful statement, and one which allows people to be religious,
is
to say, the modern observations of science do not disagree with religion.
Arno Penzias
PHYSICS, 1978
129. I consider the power to believe to be one of the great divine gifts to man through which he is allowed in some inexplicable manner to come near to the mysteries of the Universe without understanding them.
Ernst Chain
MEDICINE, 1945
130. The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
131. I feel that my faith and my scientific work have mutually reinforced each other . . . The wondrous experience of understanding, perhaps understanding for the first time, something about the natural world is a deep religious experience.
Walter Kohn
CHEMISTRY, 1998
132. Being an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian seems perfectly natural to me.
William Phillips
PHYSICS, 1997
133. Whether or not God is dead, it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.
Elias Canetti
LITERATURE, 1981
134. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.
Steven Weinberg
PHYSICS, 1979
135. I think in many respects religion is a dream—a beautiful dream often. Often a nightmare. But it's a dream from which I think it's about time we awoke.
Steven Weinberg
PHYSICS, 1979
136. I can believe in God's wisdom but I cannot see his mercy.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978
137. The Churches and the Faith have really done too much harm! . . . While there's a breath left in me I shall cry "No!" to the Churches.
Andre Gide
LITERATURE, 1947
On his deathbed
138. Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925
139. We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
Talk to Bible class
140. Turn your face to God and he becomes light but turn your face away from him and he becomes darkness.
William Golding
LITERATURE, 1983
141. Whenever I'm in trouble, I pray. And because I'm in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978
142. It is a fact—and I saw it with my own eyes—that man in his downfall has nothing to lean on, nothing to solace him, except faith. The NKVD brought many back to the religious fold . . . Lukishki nights taught us that faith takes better care of man, when things go badly with him, than man does of his faith when things are well with him.
Menachem Begin
PEACE, 1978
143. I have lived, and continue to live, in the belief that God is always with me. I know this from experience. In August of 1973, while exiled in Japan, I was kidnapped from my hotel room in Tokyo by intelligence agents of the then military government of South Korea. The news of the incident starded the world. The agents took me to their boat at anchor along the seashore. They tied me up, blinded me, and stuffed my mouth. Just when they were about to throw me overboard, Jesus Christ appeared before me with such clarity. I clung to him and begged him to save me. At that very moment, an airplane came down from the sky to rescue me from the moment of death.
Kim Dae-jung
PEACE, 2000
144. For four and a half months in 1918 I was in prison for pacifist propaganda . . . I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied "agnostic." He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God." This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
145. Man does not live by GNP alone.
Paul Samuelson
ECONOMICS, 1970
146. Most people seek after what they do not possess and are thus enslaved by the very things they want to acquire . . . Only when he has ceased to need things can a man truly be his own master and so really exist.
Anwaral-Sadat
PEACE, 1978
147. The craving for possessions and money, from the humble hire-purchase level, to the smash and grab tactics of the tirelessly acquisitive rich, from the alderman to the union leader and cabinet minister, and finally the dictator of a superpower, has become an epidemic disease.
Patrick White
LITERATURE, 1973
148. You have riches and freedom here but I feel no sense of faith or direction. You have so many computers, why don't you use them in the search for love?
Lech Walesa
PEACE, 1983
In Paris, on his first visit to the West
149. In the past people's mentality was formed within a large space which still exists, called the cathedral. Today human mentality is formed within another large space called the shopping centre. And the illusion there is constant.
Jose Saramago
LITERATURE, 1998
150. What is more insidious than any censorship, is the steady influence which operates silently in any mass society organized for profit, for the depression of standards of art and culture.
T S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948
151. Americans suffer from this notion that somehow they can possess their souls by means of possessing commodities. Don't they recognize that they'll end up a nation and an empire who has the capacity to conquer the world, but has completely lost its soul?
Eugene O'Neill
LITERATURE, 1936
152.1 don't know how to own things . . . I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
153. All of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.
Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964
154. Free-market societies produce unjust and very stupid societies. I don't believe that the production and consumption of things can be the meaning of human life.
Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990
155. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is litde such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970
156.1 rather like materialism. The poor need it.
V. S. Naipaul
LITERATURE, 2001
In answer to a question from the audience in India
Nobel Prize laureates often appear not only to achieve more in their lifetimes than other mortals but also to live longer lives. Although no Nobel Prize winner has, up to this point, lived to a hundred years—Hans Bethe, so far the longest lived, died in 2005 at the age of ninety-eight—many do exceed the average life expectancy. The statistics, however, are biased by the fact that in order to become a laureate one must have lived long enough for one's accomplishments to be recognized. The prize is not awarded posthumously, although in the past it was awarded to Erik Karlfeldt and Dag Hammarskjold, both of whom died after nomination, but before public announcement of the prize. It is awarded if the recipient dies after the announcement but prior to the award ceremony, as in the case of William Vickrey in 1996 who died three days after his prize for Economics was announced.
The youngest Nobel laureate was William Lawrence Bragg, who in 1915 at the age of twenty-five shared the Physics Prize with his father, William Henry Bragg. The youngest laureates to win the prize in Chemistry, Medicine, and Peace were in their thirties, whereas the youngest laureate for Literature was forty-two and for Economics fifty-one. The earliest-born Nobel Prize winner was Theodor Mommsen, who won the Literature Prize in 1902; he was born in 1817, and in 1903 became the first laureate
to die. The laureate who died youngest was Martin Luther King, who was assassinated at the age of thirty-nine, four years after winning the prize.
157. We are not the father of time. We are the children of time.
Ilya Prigogine
CHEMISTRY, 1977
158. Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
Letter to the family of his friend Michelangelo Besso, March 21, 1955, written a month before Einstein's own death
159. The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
160. It is an experimental fact that time runs slower in the vicinity of babies, especially at night. Who of us cannot remember learning the true measure of eternity by spending the first night alone with an alert baby? And who would deny the iron certainty of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle, which states that two new parents cannot possibly get a good night's sleep simultaneously?
Robert Laughlin
PHYSICS, 1998
161. Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 1987
162. Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.
Eugene O'Neill
LITERATURE, 1936
163. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
164. To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither flood nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.
Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez
LITERATURE, 1982
165. Life continues to be a mystery too great to understand. I only know that I cling to it. I fear its cessation—death. I dread its diminution—pain. I seek its enlargement—joy.
Albert Schweitzer
PEACE, 1952
166. In every human being's life there is one period when he manifests himself most fully, feels most profoundly himself, and acts with the deepest effect on himself and on others. And whatever happens to that person from that time on, no matter how outwardly significant, it is all a letdown. We remember, get drunk on, play over and over in many different keys, sing over and over to ourselves that snatch of a song that sounded just once within us.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970
167. Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.
Werner Heisenberg
PHYSICS, 1932
168.1 wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.
Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906
169.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
ill be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.
S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948
170. For every year one works beyond age 55, one loses 2 years of life span on average . . . If you . . . have to keep on working very hard until the age of 65 or older before your retirement, then you probably will die within 18 months of retirement.
Leo Esaki
PHYSICS, 1973
Based on retirement statistics at Boeing and Lockheed. Leo Esaki himself, however, was still working at the age of eighty.
171. I think there is a limit to how long one can live even if you eradicate disease. Mice have a natural lifespan of 2
V2
years. And humans, 120 years.
Linda Buck
MEDICINE, 2004
172. The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
Anatole France
LITERATURE, 1921
173. Birth was the death of him.
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 196 9
174. Youth longs not for that which was, but rather for that which could be.
Willy Brandt
PEACE, 1971
175. Students of Stockholm, Nature will begin to harden your arteries and your attitudes soon enough, without your help. You are not obligated to speed the process along.
Arno Penzias
PHYSICS, 1978
176. The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
177. Eighteen is a good time for suffering. One has all the necessary strength, and no defenses.
William Golding
LITERATURE, 1983
178. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don't be content with things as they are . . . You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
179. The most precious, creative and innovative period in your life is the 10-year period around the age of 32. Plan your career path to use this precious 10-year period wisely and effectively to produce your greatest achievement in your life.
Leo Esaki
PHYSICS, 1973
180. Most of the progress in understanding how the universe works is made by people under 40, which is just as well, or we'd end up like the Kremlin run by people over 80.
Sheldon Glashow
PHYSICS, 1979
181. The young girls in the flower of their youth still laugh and chatter on the seashore, but he who watches them gradually loses his right to love them, just as those he has loved lose the power to be loved.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
182. Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925
183. The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
T S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948
184. It's better to be seventy years young than forty years old.
Jimmy Carter
PEACE, 2002
185. The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as you're learning, you're not old.
Rosalyn Yalow
MEDICINE, 1977
186. Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
PearlS. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
187. When I cease to be indignant, I will have begun my old age.
Andre Gide
LITERATURE, 1947
188. We breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969
189.1 don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
T.S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948
190.1 think we may take it, gentlemen, that the evening light is much the same for all men. When the shadows lengthen one contrasts what one had intended to do in the beginning with what one has accomplished.
Rudyard Kipling
LITERATURE, 1907
191. I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
Eugene O'Neill
LITERATURE, 1936
192. The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez
LITERATURE, 1982
193. Old age is wonderful . . . A pity it ends so badly.
Frangois Mauriac
LITERATURE, 1952
194. I don't see why not, you look healthy enough to me.
George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925
On his ninetieth birthday, 1946, to a young reporter who said, "I hope to interview you again on your 100th birthday." This quip is also attributed to Winston Churchill.
195. There's nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 196 5
196. On our arrival in Cambridge, we had a rather frightening reception. On all the big hoardings was written in large letters: "The Man Born to be Hanged"! but soon we found out that it did not refer to me, and that it was quite harmless: the title of a cinema film, made from a crime novel.
Max Born
PHYSICS, 1954
197. I curse death. I can't help it. And if I should go blind in the process, I can't help it, I repulse death with all my strength. If I accepted it, I would be a murderer.
Elias Canetti
LITERATURE, 1981
198.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked
into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
William Butler Yeats
LITERATURE, 1923
199. To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation.