“Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”
Stephen King (1947) American author
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”
Stephen King (1947) American author
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
William J. Baumol (1922–2017) American economist
Source: The theory of environmental policy, 1988, p. 45; Cited in: Vatn, Arild, and Daniel W. Bromley. "Externalities-a market model failure." Environmental and resource economics 9.2 (1997): 135-151.
Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist
Principles of program design, 1975
Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist
Source: Three Essays (1957), p. 53, as cited in: Harold Kincaid, Don Ross (2009) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics. p. 128
Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time
Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 11
Context: As I shall describe, the prospects for finding such a theory seem to be much better now because we know so much more about the universe. But we must beware of overconfidence - we have had false dawns before! At the beginning of this century, for example, it was thought that everything could be explained in terms of the properties of continuous matter, such as elasticity and heat conduction. The discovery of atomic structure and the uncertainty principle put an emphatic end to that. Then again, in 1928, physicist and Nobel Prize winner Max Born told a group of visitors to Gottingen University, "Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months." His confidence was based on the recent discovery by Dirac of the equation that governed the electron. It was thought that a similar equation would govern the proton, which was the only other particle known at the time, and that would be the end of theoretical physics. However, the discovery of the neutron and of nuclear forces knocked that one on the head too. Having said this, I still believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.
“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer
Source: Complete Poems