“Ascending to the next group of rocks, we find the traces of life become more abundant, the number of species extended, and important additions made”

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 60

Source: 1910s, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 5. <!-- pp. 41-42 -->
Context: It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.8

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 55
Context: When we hear of carbon beginning to appear in the ascending series of rocks, we are unavoidably led to consider it as marking a time of some importance in the earth's history, a new era of natural conditions, one in which organic life has probably played a part.

Notebooks

Bethe's testimony to the U. S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee on 13 May 1982, as reported in the New York Review of Books: The Inferiority Complex, 10 June 1982 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/06/10/the-inferiority-complex/

Alleged to have been made in a September 13, 2001 press conference. This wording has not been confirmed.
Attributed, Misquotations