“Ten thousand do not turn the scale against a single man of worth.”
Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
in Eric Hoffer, Between the Devil and the Dragon (New York: 1982), p. 107
“Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands”
As quoted in The Birth of a New Physics (1959) by I. Bernard Cohen
Context: It is not in the nature of things for any one man to make a sudden violent discovery; science goes step by step, and every man depends on the work of his predecessors. When you hear of a sudden unexpected discovery—a bolt from the blue, as it were—you can always be sure that it has grown up by the influence of one man on another, and it is this mutual influence which makes the enormous possibility of scientific advance. Scientists are not dependent on the ideas of a single man, but on the combined wisdom of thousands of men, all thinking of the same problem, and each doing his little bit to add to the great structure of knowledge which is gradually being erected.
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Ernest Rutherford16
New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist 1871–1937Related quotes
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