“Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?”

— Kurt Vonnegut, book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, b…" by Kurt Vonnegut?

Kurt Vonnegut318

American writer 1922–2007

Related quotes

“To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist

Leonard Bernstein, "Leonard Bernstein discusses material & structure in Bach's St. Matthew Passion," Bernstein Century - Bach: St. Matthew Passion / Nypo, Et Al (1999) (at 6:31)

“The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Broca's Brain (1979), p. 64 http://books.google.com/books?id=90DuAAAAMAAJ <br class="br">Source: Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science <br class="br">Context: The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

“It was the White Race who produced men like Columbus who crossed the unknown Atlantic; men like Magellan who first circumnavigated the globe; men like Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Raphael and thousands of other geniuses who created beautiful and exquisite productions in the fields of sculpture and painting; geniuses like Beethoven, Bach, Wagner and Verdi who created beautiful music; men like James Watt who invented the steam engine; men like Daimler who invented and built the reciprocating internal combustion engine; production geniuses like Henry Ford, inventors like Thomas Edison; such a prodigal genius as Nikola Tesla in the field of physics and electricity; literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Goethe and thousands of others, untold geniuses in the fields of mathematics, in the fields of chemistry and physics.”

Ben Klassen (1918–1993) American engineer, author and politician

Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), Ch. 2, Paragraph 4
Nature's Eternal Religion (1973)

“Easy was, like, spending time with Jennifer on set. Difficult stuff about character is, it was a little bit like just being the only one with no superhuman powers.”

Goran Višnjić (1972) Croatian actor

Goran Visnjic while filming Elektra

“Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

“Einstein showed us how to find all the possible universes that were consistent with the laws of physics and the character of gravity, how to reconstruct their pasts and predict their futures. But actually finding them was no easy task.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

Preface
The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (2011)

“The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Religion and Science: Irreconcilable? (1948)

“But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be;
Within that circle none durst walk but he.”

John Dryden The Tempest

The Tempest, Prologue.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Like the seemingly impossible moon landing, Hollywood has repeatedly predicted the future, including self-destructing messages.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

“I read in some of it (the reference is to Shakespeare). It’s not so bad when you get used to it, pretty archaic though. Why do you like old stuff like this?”

Paul J. McAuley (1955) British writer

“It has everything in it, if you look hard enough,” Dorthy said, taking the sheaf. “Love, jealousy, avarice, loyalty, murder, madness...I find it reassuring that human nature is so constant.”

Chapter 3 “The Keep” (p. 171; ellipses in the original)
Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988)

“Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Kurt Vonnegut318

Related quotes

Related topics