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Michael Faraday 30
English scientist 1791–1867Related quotes
“I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong.”
"Say 'No' to Intolerance", Liberty magazine, vol. 4, no. 6, (July 1991) pp. 17-20.
Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1974)
Context: Life is not meaningless for the man who considers certain actions wrong simply because they are wrong, whether or not they violate the law. This kind of moral code gives a person a focus, a basis on which to conduct himself. Certainly there is a temptation to let go of morals in order to do the expedient thing. But there is also a tremendous power in standing by what is right. Principle and accomplishment need not be incompatible.
A common thread moves through all the principles I have discussed: It is the desire to improve oneself and one's surroundings by actively participating in life. Too many succumb to the emotional preference of the comfortable solution instead of the difficult one. It is easy to do nothing. And to do nothing is also an act; an act of indifference or cowardice.
A person must prepare himself intellectually and professionally and then use his powers to their fullest extent.
“The wisest man is he who is certain he is not.”
Le plus sage est celui qui ne pense point l'être.
Satire 4
Satires (1716)
Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 17
When asked by an army officer, appointed governor of a west Indies island and who had no experience in law, how to apply the law. Quoted by John Cordy Jeaffreson in A Book About Lawyers http://books.google.com/books?id=lUpqPJSlBS8C&q="tut+man+decide+promptly+but+never+give+any+reasons+for+your+decisions+your+decisions+may+be+right+but+your+reasons+are+sure+to+be+wrong"&pg=PA85#v=onepage, Volume 1 (1867).
"Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future (1962)
Perhaps the adjective "elderly" requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!
"Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" in Profiles of the Future (1962; as revised in 1973)
On Clarke's Laws