“If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.”
As quoted in "Wilson vs Watson: The blessing of great enemies" by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist (10 September 2009) http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17771-wilson-vs-watson-the-blessing-of-great-enemies.html; this is a play upon the famous statement by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Murray Gell-Mann in ISSS The Primer Project http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/seminar.html International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) seminar (12 October - 10 November 1997).
Context: Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole.
Source: The Quark and the Jaguar (1994), Ch. 12 : Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle, pp. 172-173 see EPR paradox.
Context: The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions.... the alleged effect... would violate the requirement of relativity theory that no signal... can travel faster than the speed of light. If it were to do so, it would appear to observers in some states of motion that the signal were traveling backward in time.