“Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not.”

lecture III: "This Unscientific Age"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they kee…" by Richard Feynman?
Richard Feynman photo
Richard Feynman 181
American theoretical physicist 1918–1988

Related quotes

Enoch Powell photo

“Too often today people are ready to tell us: "This is not possible, that is not possible." I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Conservative Party conference, 1968 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0t3BTAF0ns
1960s

Theodore Kaczynski photo

“The big problem is that people don't believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

Interview from primitivism.com http://www.primitivism.com/kaczynski.htm
Interviews

China Miéville photo

“It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

Interview with Joan Gordon
Context: There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.

Theodore Roosevelt photo

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address at Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1912)

Otto von Bismarck photo

“I grant that I am full of prejudices; I sucked them in with my mother's milk, and I cannot possibly argue them away.”

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) German statesman, Chancellor of Germany

Speech to the Prussian United Diet (15 June 1847), quoted in W. H. Dawson, Bismarck and State Socialism: An Exposition of the Social and Economic Legislation of Germany since 1870 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), p. 27
1840s

George Borrow photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Richard Feynman photo

“I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?"”

I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=48m10s

J. B. S. Haldane photo
Richard Feynman photo

Related topics