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C. P. Snow Quotes

Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, CBE was an English novelist and physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government. He is best known for his series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers, and for The Two Cultures, a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals". Wikipedia  

✵ 15. October 1905 – 1. July 1980

Works

The Two Cultures
C. P. Snow: 7 quotes0 likes

Famous C. P. Snow Quotes

“There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves.”

C. P. Snow book The Two Cultures

Source: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), P. 61
Context: There is, of course, no complete solution. […] But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education […] There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves.

“I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right.”

C. P. Snow book The Two Cultures

Source: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), P. 10

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”

C. P. Snow book The Two Cultures

Source: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), Pp. 15-16

“Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.”

C. P. Snow book The Two Cultures

Source: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), P. 4

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”

C. P. Snow

Public Affairs (London: Macmillan, 1971) p. 195

“There are no secrets in science.”

C. P. Snow

The Physicists (1981), published posthumously.

“Try as I might, I could never feel any great affection for a man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska – sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.”

C. P. Snow

Francis King Yesterday Came Suddenly (London: Constable, 1993) p. 83.

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