Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer (7 page)
Nelson Mandela
PEACE, 1993
357. It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
Aung San Suu Kyi
PEACE, 1991
358. Emotional memories involving fear are permanently engrained in the brain. They can be suppressed but never erased.
Francis Crick
MEDICINE, 1962
359. The worst of all fears is the fear of living.
Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906
360. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
361. The 17th century was the century of mathematics, the 18th that of the physical sciences, and the 19th that of biology. Our 20th century is the century of fear.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
The popular myth that brilliant people are socially retarded is refuted by the lives of Nobel laureates. A remarkable proportion of them, particularly the scientists, married once and stayed married. Saul Bellow was married five times, and Ernest Hemingway and Bertrand Russell four times, but these are exceptions. Erwin Schrodinger, after fleeing Nazi Germany, achieved the feat of sharing his house in a staid Dublin suburb with his wife and his mistress, while carrying on affairs with his university students and fathering children with two other Irish women. One laureate, Abdus Salam, a Muslim, had two wives, which presented unusual problems of protocol at the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, where by tradition the wife of the Physics laureate goes in to dinner on the arm of the king of Sweden.
In their autobiographies, laureates frequently pay tribute to their families. Although a number of laureates emerged from very modest backgrounds, the great majority were children of professional or academic parents. The physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer, for example, was the seventh straight generation of university professors. Eight laureates had a parent who also won the Nobel Prize. Fortunately for the world, most laureates pass on their genes. Theodor Mommsen holds the record with sixteen children. Pearl S. Buck adopted nine children and founded Welcome
House, which arranged for the adoption of thousands of children fathered by American servicemen in Asia. Robert Aumann has eighteen grandchildren.
Nobel Prize winners are rarely solitary geniuses. Although the lone scientist was not unusual when the Nobel Prize was instituted in 1901, science no longer advances by means of the reclusive researcher working in a cramped laboratory. Theorists may work alone, but given the scale and complexity of experimental science today, it almost invariably requires collaboration. Many science laureates credit their success primarily to their collaboration with a brilliant senior scientist in the early years of their career. In the last twenty years, the science prizes have usually been awarded to pairs or trios of researchers. Unshared prizes, however, are still the norm for literature; few works of literature are the product ofjoint authorship.
Four married couples have won Nobel prizes. Marie and Pierre Curie, who shared the Physics Prize in 1903, epitomized married collaboration, which ended only when Pierre was tragically run over by a wagon on a Paris street. Many women have played significant roles in scientific discoveries, but women are underrepresented in the Nobel awards. Up to 2006, the Nobel Prize has been won by 735 men and 33 women. Two women have won the prize for Physics, three for Chemistry, seven for Medicine, ten for Literature, and twelve for Peace.
362. Love is an illness, but it is not mortal.
Selma Lagerlöf
LITERATURE, 1909
363. Love that stammers, that stutters, is apt to be the love that loves best.
Gabriela Mistral
LITERATURE, 1945
364. Like all the great creations of humanity, love is twofold: it is the supreme happiness and supreme misfortune.
Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990
365. Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion.
Octavio Paz
LITERATURE, 1990
366. One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.
Romain Rolland
LITERATURE, 1915
367. Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
368. We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
Mother Teresa
PEACE, 1979
369. The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the most astounding Rome had ever seen.
JaneAddams
PEACE, 1931
370. Love is the only force capable of pulling down barriers which may stand between matter and spirit, visible and invisible, individual and God.
Anwar al-Sadat
PEACE, 1978
371. How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose we know not, though sometimes sense it. But we know from daily life that we exist for other people first of all for whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
372. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964
373. No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.
Heinrich Böll
LITERATURE, 1972
374. A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
375. What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland.
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969
376. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
377. Love reciprocated is always rejuvenating.
T. S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948
Replying to a toast by the sculptor Jacob Epstein on his seventieth birthday in 1958, the year after his marriage at sixty-eight to Valerie Fletcher, age thirty
378. In the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that love is no hothouse flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed, but, flower or weed, whose scent and color are always wild!
John Galsworthy
LITERATURE, 1932
379. You don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
380. How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
381. The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925
382. Married love, enduring through a thousand vicissitudes, seems to me the most beautiful of miracles, even if the most common.
François Mauriac
LITERATURE, 1952
383.1 believe marriage to be the best and most important relation that can exist between two human beings.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
384. If the world of the twentieth century cannot succeed in this one thing, married love, then it has committed suicide.
Sinclair Lewis
LITERATURE, 1930
385. You should look around carefully at the members of the opposite sex, and pick one out that you'd like to be with all your life. Get married young, and stay married.
Linus Pauling
CHEMISTRY, 1954; PEACE, 1962
386. Incidentally, you're my fiancée now.
George Hitchings
MEDICINE, 1988
Proposal to Joyce Shaver Hitchings, M.D., while she was driving him to an event
387. You can be married in the church if you want to, but not to me.
John Bardeen
PHYSICS, 1956; PHYSICS, 1972
To his fiancée
388. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
389. It's only an improbable accident when a woman and a man who are both of them big enough not to be jealous of each other's bigness do meet—and then, probably, when they do meet, one of them will already be married to some little pretentious squirt and they can't marry!
Sinclair Lewis
LITERATURE, 1930
390. The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant.
John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962
391. An unhappy marriage! No ill treatment—only that indefinable malaise, that terrible blight which killed all sweetness under Heaven; and so from day to day, from night to night, from week to week, from year to year, till death should end it!
John Galsworthy
LITERATURE, 1932
392. Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood, but an ordinary chemist!
Wolfgang Pauli
PHYSICS, 1945
On his ex-wife's remarriage
393. Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger
PEACE, 1973
394. Why two sexes rather than three? What a source of new plots three sexes would provide for novelists, of new variations for psychologists, of new complications for lawyers.
François Jacob
MEDICINE, 1965
395. How is it that, in the human body, reproduction is the only function to be performed by an organ of which an individual carries only one half so that he has to spend an enormous amount of time and energy to find another half?
François Jacob
MEDICINE, 1965
396. I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.
Saul Bellow
LITERATURE, 1976
397. I learned that the sexual revolution is a very bloody affair, like most revolutions.
Saul Bellow
LITERATURE, 1976
When asked his views on marriage in 1997
398. To fully experience the joys of adultery, one must be a person of piety.
Anatole France
LITERATURE, 1921
399. Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
Anatole France
LITERATURE, 1921
400. In societies where men are truly confident of their own worth, women are not merely tolerated but valued.
Aung San Suu Kyi
PEACE, 1991
401. The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
402. Men and women can face anything, can endure anything, if they are sure of each other's loyalty and liking. They can endure nothing if they are not sure of each other.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
403. I have never seen in any country—and I have seen most of the countries of the world—such an unsatisfactory relationship between men and women as there is in America.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
404. Of privileges women have had plenty, and yet most of them have been denied the one great blessing of man's life—the necessity to go out in the world and earn their bread directly.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
405. You can have it all!
Rosalyn Yalow
MEDICINE, 1977
406. The humiliation inflicted on women is the result of a diseased gene that is passed to every generation of men, not only by society as a whole but also by their mothers. It is mothers who raise boys who become men. It is up to mothers not to pass on that diseased cultural gene.
Shirin Ebadi
PEACE, 2003
407. Instead of telling girls to cover their hair, we should teach them to use their heads.
Shirin Ebadi
PEACE, 2003
408. What begins as the neglect of the interests of women ends in causing adversity for the health and survival of all.
Amartya Sen
ECONOMICS, 1998
409. Women are ultimately the key to development, they are the key to eradication of poverty. Once you empower them, you empower a nation.
Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984
410. Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Rabindranath Tagore
LITERATURE, 1913
411. To be childlike is one of the most important, indispensable, and, in the best sense, human characteristics of man.
Konrad Lorenz
MEDICINE, 1973
412. To have the heart of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honor.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
413. People, especially young people, need compliments and admiration. We must give them a sense of their importance and dignity, and we must encourage them to use and develop all their talents. If ever I have children, I'll certainly do so. I'll tell them outright that they're important and that they're beautiful.
Mairead Corrigan
PEACE, 1976
414. I have lived in a world of children and of child humor, child fantasy, and child passions for four decades. If only I can grow old, foolishly old in this same world—if it is my fate to grow old—I shall be most fortunate.
Carleton Gajdusek
MEDICINE, 1976
415. I've written maybe thirty books, I don't remember exactly; but I have five children, and that is my real blessing.
Knut Hamsun
LITERATURE, 1920
416. To be the father of a nation is a great honor, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy.
Nelson Mandela
PEACE, 1993
417. Unless the child learns how to love a parent profoundly, I believe that he will never learn how to love anyone else profoundly, and not knowing how to love means the loss of the meaning of life and its fulfillment.