Quotes about chemical
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“If the present volume will help towards the comprehension of the fundamental principles on which the science of thermodynamics rests, and also serve to bring home the importance of a knowledge of these principles in the suggestion and interpretation of experimental work, the purpose which has been kept in view during its preparation will have been amply fulfilled. In any case, it is hoped that neither the extreme view that thermodynamic principles alone suffice in the construction of a systematic physical or chemical science, nor the equally mistaken opinion that they are of little practical utility to the experimental worker, can fairly result from its study.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

A Text-Book of Thermodynamics with Special Reference to Chemistry (1913)

Hope, Home, Knowledge, Study

“In 1978 when the book Living Systems was published, it contained the prediction that the sciences that were concerned with biological and social sciences would, in the future, be stated as rigorously as the “hard sciences” that study such nonliving phenomenon as temperature, distance, and the interaction of chemical elements. Principles of Quantitative Living Systems Science, the first of a planned series of three books, begins an attempt to fulfill that prediction…
It is our opinion that this book represents an important step in the development of a quantitative living systems science… As Simms shows, the concepts of available energy and the capacity to direct energy, as well as the causative relationship between information and behavior, are useful in the analysis of behavior…
The systems with which this first book of the series is concerned are mainly at the level of the cell and the animal organ and organism…. It will be interesting to see how the science is applied in later volumes to the complex behaviors of human being, and higher level systems.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

James G. and Jessie Miller (1999) Principles of Quantitative Living Systems Science. Foreword; As cited in: James R. Simms (2013) "Advances in living systems theory"

Books, Behavior, Study, Science

“Conventional physics deals only with closed systems, i. e. systems which are considered to be isolated from their environment… However, we find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 7. Some Aspects of System Theory in Biology, p. 166-167 as quoted in: Eugene Thacker (2004) Biomedia. University of Minnesota Press. p. 150

Nature

“How do you find what's going to make everybody have this strange reaction in their bodies, this response that's sort of chemical and physical all at once—this noise and emotion that changes how you sit? A laugh is a weird sound, and when you get a couple thousand people making it at once, it's really strange. But when I can feel proud of myself for causing it, it's great.”

Billy Crystal (1948) American actor

Interview with Oprah Winfrey

People, Feeling, Change

“A mechanical manufacture being commonly occupied with one substance, which it conducts through metamorphoses in regular succession^ may be made nearly automatic; whereas a chemical manufacture depends on the play of delicate affinities between two or more substances, which it has to subject to heat and mixture under circumstances somewhat uncertain, and must therefore remain, to a corresponding extent, a manual operation.”

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) Scottish doctor and chemist

Source: The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 2

Success, Dependency

“They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir book Renoir

Quoted in [2001, Jean Renoir, Renoir: My Father, New York Review of Books, New York, 9780940322776, https://books.google.com/books?id=RR8Mk2QrvyoC&pg=PA137, 137]
undated quotes

God, Tree

“This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an extensive country, for it consists of only a hundred or so regions (as we shall often term the elements), yet it accounts for everything material in our actual world. From the hundred elements that are at the center of our story, all planets, rocks, vegetation, and animals are made. These elements are the basis of the air, the oceans, and the Earth itself. We stand on the elements, we eat the elements, we are the elements. Because our brains are made up of elements, even our opinions are, in a sense, properties of the elements and hence inhabitants of the kingdom.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Source: Periodic Kingdom (1995), Chapter 1. The Terrain

World, Sense, Animals, Country

“It is a win-win situation for us — no harm to janitors by way of daily exposure to chemicals, and cows will be valued more.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On the use of gomutra as a floor cleaner, as quoted in "Holy cow! Government offices may soon be cleaned using liquid made from bovine urine" http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-01-09/news/57883715_1_cow-urine-product-floors, The Economic Times (9 January 2015) 2011-present

Way

“Chemical reasoning, as used both in applications and in basic research, resembles a detective story in which tangible clues lead to a mental picture of events never directly witnessed by the detective.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 1 : The Atom in Modern Chemistry

“I have never been a supporter of or an apologist for Saddam Hussein. Indeed, I recall many lonely occasions in the House when I spoke against Saddam Hussein, his genocide against the Kurdish people and the way that the British Government were financing the re-arming of Iraq. Indeed, the chemical weapons being manufactured in Iraq largely comprise chemicals made in western Europe and north America. Some £1 billion was loaned to Saddam Hussein by British banks, with the agreement of the British Government. His power is largely the creation of western Europe and north America. I do not support him and I do not think that he was right to invade Kuwait…The only purpose of sending troops to the region is to defend and guarantee oil supplies. I find it difficult to accept that the United States is merely defending a small country against a larger country. If that were true, why were Grenada and Panama invaded? What was the Vietnam war about, other than a powerful United States wishing to extend its control and influence throughout the world? …If the shooting starts and there is war in the Gulf, the retaking of Kuwait will not be a clean, clinical operation—it will be a filthy and long war with hundreds of thousands of dead, and at the end of that war there will still have to be negotiations on the future order and the future government of that area and those countries.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/nov/07/first-day in the House of Commons (7 November 1990). 1990s

War, People, World, Way

“They bombed innocent people trying to murder Saddam
When they gave 'em those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information they hold back from Peter Jennings 'cause Condoleeza Rice is just a new-age Sally Hemmings.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The 4th Branch
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

War, People, Age

“To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.”

H.L. Mencken book Treatise on the Gods

Treatise on the Gods (1930; 2nd Edition 1946)
1930s

Life, Disease, Penalty, Sex

“The conservation of matter in a chemical change is represented in a balanced chemical equation for that process. The study of the relationships between the numbers of reactant and product molecules is called stoichiometry. Stoichiometry is fundamental to all aspects of chemistry.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 2 : Chemical Formulas, Equations, and Reaction Yields

Study, Change

“It is possible for your ideas to cause chemical reactions that impede your body’s ability to accept nourishment. If you believe that the body is evil, the purest health-food diet will or may do you little good at all, while if you have a healthy desire and respect for your physical body, a diet of TV dinners, and even fast foods, may well keep you healthy and nourished.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 259

Health, Food, Idea, Evil

“Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.”

Sarah Vowell book The Partly Cloudy Patriot

The Partly Cloudy Patriot (2003)

World, History, Drink, Waiting

“Science views the blood-building and character-influencing ur-organism "water" merely as a chemical compound and provides millions of people with a liquid prepared from this point of view, which is everything but healthy water.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Water Wizard

People, Water, Science

“The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U. S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 75-76

People, Disease, School, Food

“["Do you see a tie in between being a vegetarian and helping the environment?"] All of our cleaning products, lotions, shampoos, and toothpaste are organic and non-chemical, non-animal tested. You don’t have to be a vegetarian to be against animal testing, but it goes hand in hand. You know the rainforest that’s cut down or the land that’s cleared for cattle and factory farm animals, the destruction of the rain forest specifically for beef cattle is mind boggling to the both of us that they would destroy a very precious eco system just so cows have a place to eat grass. The people in South America don’t even really get to eat that beef but the land is being destroyed for it, and definitely the methane that’s produced from the cows and pigs. It’s definitely contributing to global warming. It’s hard for people to wrap their minds around the fact that their cheeseburger is making global warming worse. I think it’s an important message for people to get, but it’s hard for people to put the two together and make the connection.”

Susie Feldman (1982) American actress

"Watch “The Two Coreys” this Sunday", interview with PETA (27 July 2007) https://www.peta.org/blog/watch-two-coreys-sunday/.

People, Thinking, Grass, Help

“No-one in their senses wants nuclear weapons for their own sake, but equally, no responsible prime minister could take the colossal gamble of giving up our nuclear defences while our greatest potential enemy kept their's. Policies which would throw out all American nuclear bases…would wreck NATO and leave us totally isolated from our friends in the United States, and friends they are. No nation in history has ever shouldered a greater burden nor shouldered it more willingly nor more generously than the United States. This Party is pro-American. And we must constantly remind people what the defence policy of the [Labour] Party would mean. Their idea that by giving up our nuclear deterrent, we could somehow escape the result of a nuclear war elsewhere is nonsense, and it is a delusion to assume that conventional weapons are sufficient defence against nuclear attack. And do not let anyone slip into the habit of thinking that conventional war in Europe is some kind of comfortable option. With a huge array of modern weapons held by the Soviet Union, including chemical weapons in large quantities, it would be a cruel and terrible conflict. The truth is that possession of the nuclear deterrent has prevented not only nuclear war but also conventional war and to us, peace is precious beyond price. We are the true peace party.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (12 October 1984) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105763 Second term as Prime Minister

War, People, Truth, Peace

“Our cause is just, and it continues. Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and showed us the true scope of the task ahead. We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos, where they laugh about the loss of innocent life. And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Life, World, Fear, Water

“We find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 2. The Meaning of General Systems Theory, p. 39

Nature

“The science of the age, in short, is physical, chemical, physiological; in all shapes mechanical. Our favourite Mathematics, the highly prized exponent of all these other sciences, has also become more and more mechanical. Excellence in what is called its higher departments depends less on natural genius than on acquired expertness in wielding its machinery. Without undervaluing the wonderful results which a Lagrange or Laplace educes by means of it, we may remark, that their calculus, differential and integral, is little else than a more cunningly-constructed arithmetical mill; where the factors, being put in, are, as it were, ground into the true product, under cover, and without other effort on our part than steady turning of the handle. We have more Mathematics than ever; but less Mathesis.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Age, Education, Mathematics, Nature

“After a lot of Googling I came across some incredibly inspirational people, in particular Kris Carr, who overnight changed my life. She had changed her diet to manage her cancer and had written a wonderful book all about it, so I ordered the book and immediately realized that if she could come back from that, I could absolutely come back from where I was. So, overnight I started a whole-foods, plant-based diet and gave up all meat, dairy, sugar, gluten, anything processed and all chemicals and additives. As you can imagine it was a really difficult change for someone who had never eaten fruit or vegetables before, let alone quinoa, buckwheat and chia seeds! I'll never forget the looks on my family's faces when I told them I was becoming a gluten-free vegan—I don't think I've ever seen people so surprised and confused.”

Ella Woodward (1991) British blogger

Deliciously Ella (2015)

Life, People, Books, Family

“In combination with other infernal contraptions, like rockets to deliver bombs at large distances, chemical, biological and radioactive poisons, such a war must mean a degree of human suffering and degradation which is beyond the power of imagination. No country would be immune, but those with highly developed industry would suffer most. It is very doubtful whether our technological civilization would survive such a catastrophe.
One may be inclined to regard this as no great loss, but as a just punishment for its shortcomings and sins: the lack of productive genius in art and literature, the neglect of the moral teachings of religion and philosophy, the slowness to abandon outdated political conceptions, like national sovereignty. Yet we are all involved in this tragedy, and the instinct of self-preservation, the love of our children, makes us think about a way of salvation.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Physics in my generation (1956)

Love, War, Children, Religion

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo stillmore complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume III, chapter I: "The Spread of Evolution", page 18 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=30&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=image; letter to Joseph Hooker (1871) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Light, Change

“The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language. For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet of only 26 letters. Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the 5th century, and many of them were completely new. The principle is the same in genetics. There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical components. For another example, we know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular which is now extinct. Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique slang lingo –thus diverging into new dialects, and eventually distinct forms of gibberish such that the new Romans could no longer communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards. Similarly, if we took an original Latin speaking population and divided them sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, or their jargon may have become unintelligible to foreigners. But they won’t start speaking Italian or Romanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to occur twice.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Communication, Understanding

“Intelligence is always connective. The biosphere works this way, through continuous contacts, catalysts, neurons which touch and activate other neurons. Today, this all has not only biological and chemical consistency, but a technological and teleinformatics one: it is not just a metaphor, or a "virtual" reality, but a real entity, a kind of emanation of the biosphere.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 138

Way, Intelligence, Reality

“You could argue people are generally better off now mentally than they were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We're not jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 7, p. 37–38

People, Food, Coffee, Nature

“Sam Treiman… has quoted something he called Treiman's theorem… Impossible things usually don't happen…. With the discovery of radioactivity… it suddenly became apparent that the "impossible" was happening all the time. Uranium, thorium, radium… fit all the requirements of chemical elements. They could not be broken down by any of the standard methods… But occasionally… atoms of these elements spontaneously changed into other kinds of atoms…. So what is left of the doctrine of the elements? Is alchemy reinstated? Not at all. The point is that the doctrine fails only under rare or special conditions…. We can isolate the conditions in which they do, and retain a more restricted but still useful concept of the "impossible."”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Quotes, Change, Time

“The Patriot Act does not authorize the government to go into your house or read your mail without probable cause and a warrant. It does allow law enforcement and intelligence personnel to better share information and better coordinate with each other. It does give national security investigators tools like those criminal investigators have used for years. And it does update the law to keep up with evolving technology and increasingly sophisticated terrorists. Many of the tools in the Patriot Act are identical to those that have been used for years to investigate drug dealers and white-collar crime. They've been used effectively, and they've been used without an adverse impact on civil liberties. So criticism of the Patriot Act has always begged the question: if we can use these tools successfully and prudently in the area of dealing with, say, drug traffickers, why shouldn’t they be used in the war against terrorists who want to import chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons to inflict mass civilian casualties?”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

Speech regarding Civil Liberties and the War on Terrorism (November 20, 2006)

War, Law, Intelligence, Question

“Saddam's defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding the disarmament of his nuclear, chemical, biological, and long-range missile capacity has led to sanctions on Iraq and has undermined the authority of the U. N. For 12 years, the international community has tried to persuade him to disarm and thereby avoid military conflict, most recently through the unanimous adoption of UNSCR 1441. The responsibility is his. If Saddam refuses even now to cooperate fully with the United Nations, he brings on himself the serious consequences foreseen in UNSCR 1441 and previous resolutions.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, A Vision for Iraq and the Iraqi people (March 2003)

Communication

“Let me remind you that science is not necessarily wisdom. To know, is not the sole nor even the highest office of the intellect; and it loses all its glory unless it act in furtherance of the great end of man's life. That end is, as both reason and revelation unite in telling us, to acquire the feelings and habits that will lead us to love and seek what is good in all its forms, and guide us by following its traces to the first Great Cause of all, where only we find it pure and unclouded.
If science be cultivated in congruity with this, it is the most precious possession we can have— the most divine endowment. But if it be perverted to minister to any wicked or ignoble purpose — if it even be permitted to take too absolute a hold of the mind, or overshadow that which should be paramount over all, the perception of right, the sense of Duty — if it does not increase in us the consciousness of an Almighty and All-beneficent presence, — it lowers instead of raising us in the great scale of existence.
This, however, it can never do but by our fault. All its tendencies are heavenward; every new fact which it reveals is a ray from the origin of light, which leads us to its source. If any think otherwise, their knowledge is imperfect, or their understanding warped, or darkened by their passions. The book of nature is, like that of revelation, written by God, and therefore cannot contradict it; both we are unable to read through all their extent, and therefore should neither wonder nor be alarmed if at times we miss the pages which reconcile any seeming inconsistence. In both, too, we may fail to interpret rightly that which is recorded; but be assured, if we search them in quest of truth alone, each will bear witness to the other, — and physical knowledge, instead of being hostile to religion, will be found its most powerful ally, its most useful servant. Many, I know, think otherwise; and because attempts have occasionally been made to draw from astronomy, from geology, from the modes of the growth and formation of animals and plants, arguments against the divine origin of the sacred Scripture, or even to substitute for the creative will of an intelligent first cause the blind and casual evolution of some agency of a material system, they would reject their study as fraught with danger. In this I must express my deep conviction that they do injury to that very cause which they think they are serving.
Time will not let me touch further on the cavils and errors in question; and besides they have been often fully answered. I will only say, that I am here surrounded by many, matchless in the sciences which are supposed so dangerous, and not less conspicuous for truth and piety. If they find no discord between faith and knowledge, why should you or any suppose it to exist? On the contrary, they cannot be well separated. We must know that God is, before we can confess Him; we must know that He is wise and powerful before we can trust in Him, — that He is good before we can love Him. All these attributes, the study of His works had made known before He gave that more perfect knowledge of himself with which we are blessed. Among the Semitic tribes his names betoken exalted nature and resistless power; among the Hellenic races they denote his wisdom; but that which we inherit from our northern ancestors denotes his goodness. All these the more perfect researches of modern science bring out in ever-increasing splendour, and I cannot conceive anything that more effectually brings home to the mind the absolute omnipresence of the Deity than high physical knowledge. I fear I have too long trespassed on your patience, yet let me point out to you a few examples.
What can fill us with an overwhelming sense of His infinite wisdom like the telescope? As you sound with it the fathomless abyss of stars, till all measure of distances seems to fail and imagination alone gauges the distance; yet even there as here is the same divine harmony of forces, the same perfect conservation of systems, which the being able to trace in the pages of Newton or Laplace makes us feel as if we were more than men. If it is such a triumph of intellect to trace this law of the universe, how transcendent must that Greatest over all be, in which it and many like it, have their existence! That instrument tells us that the globe which we inhabit is but a speck, the existence of which cannot be perceived beyond our system. Can we then hope that in this immensity of worlds we shall not be overlooked? The microscope will answer. If the telescope lead to one verge of infinity, it brings us to the other; and shows us that down in the very twilight of visibility the living points which it discloses are fashioned with the most finished perfection, — that the most marvellous contrivances minister to their preservation and their enjoyment, — that as nothing is too vast for the Creator's control, so nothing is too minute or trifling for His care. At every turn the philosopher meets facts which show that man's Creator is also his Father, — things which seem to contain a special provision for his use and his happiness : but I will take only two, from their special relation to this very district. Is it possible to consider the properties which distinguish iron from other metals without a conviction that those qualities were given to it that it might be useful to man, whatever other purposes might be answered by them. That it should. be ductile and plastic while influenced by heat, capable of being welded, and yet by a slight chemical change capable of adamantine hardness, — and that the metal which alone possesses properties so precious should be the most abundant of all, — must seem, as it is, a miracle of bounty. And not less marvellous is the prescient kindness which stored up in your coalfields the exuberant vegetation of the ancient world, under circumstances which preserved this precious magazine of wealth and power, not merely till He had placed on earth beings who would use it, but even to a late period of their existence, lest the element that was to develope to the utmost their civilization and energy migbt be wasted or abused.
But I must conclude with this summary of all which I would wish to impress on your minds—* that the more we know His works the nearer we are to Him. Such knowledge pleases Him; it is bright and holy, it is our purest happiness here, and will assuredly follow us into another life if rightly sought in this. May He guide us in its pursuit; and in particular, may this meeting which I have attempted to open in His name, be successful and prosperous, so that in future years they who follow me in this high office may refer to it as one to be remembered with unmixed satisfaction.”

Thomas Romney Robinson

Robinson in his 1849 adress, as quoted in the Report of the Nineteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science https://archive.org/stream/report36sciegoog#page/n50/mode/2up, London, 1850.

Love, Life, Wisdom, Men

“Secrecy was paramount. Britain's imperial general staff knew there would be outrage if it became known that the government was intending to use its secret stockpile of chemical weapons. But Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war, brushed aside their concerns. As a long-term advocate of chemical warfare, he was determined to use them against the Russian Bolsheviks.”

Giles Milton (1966) British writer and historian

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons (1 September 2013), .

War, Secret

“In Sudan, Bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam's enemies. Bin Laden's first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF [Sudan's National Islamic Front], Iraq's intelligence service and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad with its intelligence officers in Sudan and by a [Hassan] Turabi-brokered June-1994 visit by Iraq's then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan's Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors. Turabi had plans to formulate a "common strategy" with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U. S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed a good rapport that would "flourish" in the late 1990s.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

Through Our Enemies Eyes (p. 124)
2000s

Intelligence

“In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Source: Propaganda (1928), p. 39

Life

“They were the misfits of the world, the outcasts, for they deviated from the norm of humanity as established through all of history. Yet it was this very deviation which made them the hope of all mankind. Ordinary human beings—the kind of human beings who had brought the race this far—were not enough today. The ordinary humans had pushed the culture forward as far as they could push it. It had served its purpose; it had brought the ordinary human as far as he could go. Now the race evolved. Now new abilities had awoke and grown—exactly as the creatures of the Earth had evolved and specialized and then evolved again from that first moment when the first feeble spark of life had come into being in the seething chemical bath of a new and madcap planet.
Twisted brains, the normal people called them; magic people, dwellers of the darkness—and could anyone say no to this? For each people set its standards for each generation and these standards and these norms were not set by any universal rule, by no all-encompassing yardstick, but by what amounted to majority agreement, with the choice arrived at through all the prejudice and bias, all the faulty thinking and the unstable logic to which all intelligence is prone.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 31 (pp. 233-234)

Life, People, World, Hope

“When the regime wanted additional industrial capacity or resources for the military economy which the private sector could not provide, it was created (or conquered) by the state… during the Third Reich state ownership expanded into the productive sectors, based on the strategic industries, aviation, aluminum, synthetic oil and rubber, chemicals, iron and steel, and army equipment. Government finances for state-owned enterprises rose from RM 4,000m in 1933 to RM 16,000m 10 years later; the capital assets of state-owned industry doubled during the same period; the number of state-owned firms topped 500.”

Richard Overy (1947) British historian

Source: War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), p. 16

“[The smallest bacterium] is so much more like people than Stanley Miller’s mixtures of chemicals, because it already has these system properties. So to go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Cited in the book: Is There a Creator Who Cares About You?

People

“They can picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility of fire. Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision

Love, Men, Star, Sense

“It takes powers which are permanent—this is not a temporary provisions Bill—and cover all fuels. I welcome the Bill because it will enable a Labour Government to do all they want under Labour's programme for Britain…It will give us the power to control all the oil companies, all the multi-nationals, to fix their prices and their distribution systems; and under these powers every other fuel and its use, including the chemical industry, will be brought within the control of the Government of the day. This will include road transport and private transport.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech in the House of Commons (26 November 1973) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1973/nov/26/fuel-and-electricity-bill on the Conservatives' Fuel and Electricity (Control) Bill 1970s

“Canada got one break in the Walkerton tragedy: the deadly contamination of the Ontario town's water supply, which killed seven people in the summer of 2000, came from cow manure. If the contamination had come instead from, say, a toxic chemical produced by a foreign company, that would have been worse. Then the company might well have sued Canada for hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Linda McQuaig (1951) journalist and author

All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)

People, Water, Summer

“But just like voices, thoughts are underpinned by physical stuff. We know this because alterations to the brain change the kinds of thoughts we can think. In a state of deep sleep, there are no thoughts. When the brain transitions into dream sleep, there are unbidden, bizarre thoughts. During the day we enjoy our normal, well-accepted thoughts, which people enthusiastically modulate by spiking the chemical cocktails of the brain with alcohol, narcotics, cigarettes, coffee, or physical exercise. The state of the physical material determines the state of the thoughts. And the physical material is absolutely necessary for normal thinking to tick along. If you were to injure your pinkie in an accident you’d be distressed, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this might change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, read signals from your body, or understand the concept of a mirror—thereby unmasking the strange, veiled workings of the machinery beneath. Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, comic instincts, great ideas, fetishes, senses of humor, and desires all emerge from this strange organ—and when the brain changes, so do we. So although it’s easy to intuit that thoughts don’t have a physical basis, that they are something like feathers on the wind, they in fact depend directly on the integrity of the enigmatic, three-pound mission control center.”

David Eagleman (1971) neuroscientist and author

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

People, Alcohol, Fear, Dreams

“And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary, demon is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy.... Here among us on the lowest rung of the world of life, no attention is paid to books unless they are written by chemically analyzed demons, or at least for them. Poets and philosophers are respected in proportion to the contempt and disgust they feel for the creation of life. Give this day our daily war is the prayer of those who govern countries. Kill, kill, said the outlaw Skuggasveinn...”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Dr. Sýngmann
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Life, War, Books, World

“One man I know, and one only, who can be praised for his achievements in this science. Of discourses and battles of words he takes no heed: he follows the works of wisdom, and in these finds rest. What others strive to see dimly and blindly, like bats in twilight, he gazes at in the full light of day, because he is a master of experiment. Through experiment he gains knowledge of natural things, medical, chemical, indeed of everything in the heavens or earth. He is ashamed that things should be known to laymen, old women, soldiers, ploughmen, of which he is ignorant. Therefore he has looked closely into the doings of those who work in metals and minerals of all kinds; he knows everything relating to the art of war, the making of weapons, and the chase; he has looked closely into agriculture, mensuration, and farming work; he has even taken note of the remedies, lot casting, and charms used by old women and by wizards and magicians, and of the deceptions and devices of conjurors, so that nothing which deserves inquiry should escape him, and that he may be able to expose the falsehoods of magicians. If philosophy is to be carried to its perfection and is to be handled with utility and certainty, his aid is indispensable. As for reward, he neither receives nor seeks it. If he frequented kings and princes, he would easily find those who would bestow on him honours and wealth. Or, if in Paris he would display the results of his researches, the whole world would follow him. But since either of these courses would hinder him from pursuing the great experiments in which he delights, he puts honour and wealth aside, knowing well that his wisdom would secure him wealth whenever he chose. For the last three years he has been working at the production of a mirror that shall produce combustion at a fixed distance; a problem which the Latins have neither solved nor attempted, though books have been written upon the subject.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Tertium

Bridges assumes that Bacon refers here to Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt. Source: Opus Tertium, c. 1267, Ch. 13 as quoted in J. H. Bridges, The 'Opus Majus' of Roger Bacon (1900) Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=6F0XAQAAMAAJ Preface p.xxv

Wisdom, Women, War, Books

“I was very focussed on building various competencies in Reliance and we were not ready to do two things at the same time. It was a big risk for us to get into IT, especially because it was hugely effort-intensive. In my language, I said we have too much soap on our body and we need to take a bath in the chemicals business.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on how Reliance was built

Business, Effort, Time

“My reference points were US companies. We were hugely influenced by large US chemical companies, especially DuPont. It was a very open company and we could take advantage of their learnings. The US is also a very open society. I could to go the US Association of Chemical Engineers and get the standards, data, etc.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on how Reliance was built

Learning

“Human communities are ecosystems. Ecosystems are biological, chemical and physical systems. The physics, chemistry and biology of complex self-organizing systems can tell us much that is useful about human communities: about the conditions necessary for the existence of human communities, about the properties human communities 'inherit' because they are special cases of more general kinds of systems, particularly ecosystems.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 159

Communication

“Little of the old establishment survives in modern industry: the emphasis is upon change and adaptability; the rate of change mounts to an increasing tempo. We have in fact passed beyond that stage of human organisation in which effective communication and collaboration were secured by established routines of relationship. For this change, physico-chemical and technical development are responsible. It is no longer possible for an industrial society to assume that the technical processes of manufacture will exist unchanged for long in any type of work. On the contrary, every industry is constantly seeking to change, not only its methods, but the very materials it uses; this development has been stimulated by the war.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, 1945, p. 13; Partly cited in: Lyndall Urwick & Edward Brech (1949). The Making Of Scientific Management Volume III https://archive.org/stream/makingofscientif032926mbp#page/n241/mode/1up, p. 216

War, Communication, Change

“The projected form does make some impression upon the physical system. It is possible for it to be detected. It is a kind of pseudo-image, materialistically speaking, but it has definite electromagnetic reality and chemical properties. Animals have sensed such apparitions. They react to the chemical properties and build up [the perception] from these. These chemical properties are more diffused in such an apparition than in a physical form, however.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 338 quoting from Session 269

Reality, Sense, Animals

“Though one discovery always surpasses another, and though the chemical and physical knowledge accumulated since his time has gone beyond all Lavoisier's dreams, his work, like that of Newton and a few other rare spirits, will remain ever young. Certain details will age, as do the fashions of another time, but the foundation, the method, constitute one of those great aspects of the human mind, the majesty of which is only increased by years.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

The Life of Pasteur (1902)

Age, Dreams, Fashion, Knowledge

“Regarding Iraq, bin Laden, as noted, was in contact with Baghdad's intelligence service since at least 1994. He reportedly cooperated with it in the area of chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear [CBRN] weapons and may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin al-Khalq.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

Through Our Enemies' Eyes (p. 184)
2000s

Intelligence, Training

“As mineralogy constitutes a part of chemistry, it is clear that this arrangement [of minerals] must derive its principles from chemistry. The most perfect mode of arrangement would certainly be to allow bodies to follow each other according to the order of their electro-chemical properties, from the most electro-negative, oxygen, to the most electro-positive, potassium; and to place every compound body according to its most electro-positive ingredient.”

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) Swedish chemist

Jöns Jacob Berzelius, An Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Mineralogy (1814), trans. J. Black, 48.

Parting, Perfection

“The nature of the chemical bond is the problem at the heart of all chemistry.”

Bryce Crawford (1914–2011) American chemist (1914-2011)

New Chemistry‎ (1957) by the editors of Scientific American, p. 65

Nature, Problem, Heart

“The atheists aren't the problem here. For example, atheists would not take sequestered school children and force them to recite the daily mantra that there is no god, because atheists aren't the ones imposing religious views onto other people's children, and thus denying their rights. It's not the atheists who impede medical research either; we're usually not the ones against free or affordable healthcare, and we're not the ones minimizing or criminalizing women healthcare either. We're not the ones proudly perpetuating prejudice, be it racism, sexism or homophobia (among others). We're not the ones prohibiting or punishing partnerships between consenting adults, and we were not the ones who argued that persecution against gays (for example) should be somehow excusable or not considered a hate crime if it's done in the spirit or inspired by religion. Atheists don't want religion to have exemptions under the law, and why should we? It's not our demographic that has the most divorces, that has the most chemical dependencies, domestic violence, criminal convictions or even abortions. The only thing we might have more of are diplomas.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Don't Blame the Atheists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Ca88xNw_w (October 21, 2012)

Women, God, Hate, Children

“Chemists usually write about their chemical careers in terms of the different areas and the discrete projects in those areas on which they have worked. Essentially all my chemical investigations, however, are in only one area, and I tend to view my research not with respect to projects, but with respect to where I’ve been driven by two passions which I acquired in graduate school: I am passionate about the Periodic Table (and selenium, titanium and osmium are absolutely thrilling), and I am passionate about catalysis. What the ocean was to the child, the Periodic Table is to the chemist; new catalytic reactivity is, of course, my personal coelacanth.”

K. Barry Sharpless (1941) American chemist

Nobel lecture, 2001

School, Passion, Personality

“We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979)

Life, Optimism

“Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 102

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) Geneticist and evolutionary biologist

"When I am Dead" in Possible Worlds (1927)

“The thing about herbs is that there is nothing supernatural or implausible about the fact that any particular herb can have a medicinal effect. But the truth of the matter is that herbs are drugs. There's nothing magical about them. The fact that they are "natural" is irrelevant — it's meaningless. They are drugs. They are drugs that have not been purified, identified, … and quantified. … Probably for most plants … there are hundreds of chemicals in there with varying degrees of potency.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #78 – January 15th, 2007 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/78 The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Truth, Nature

“[The Joint Intelligence Committee] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Hansard http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo020924/debtext/20924-01.htm#20924-01_spmin0 House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 390, col. 3. House of Commons statement on publication of the dossier concerning Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction, 24 September 2002. 2000s

Intelligence

“Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions?””

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Second Sin (1973), p. 102.

Disease, Communication

“We believe that the elements in the chemical formula of our creative work, problem, invention, and art, correspond to the challenges of our age.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

quote, p. 378
posthumous publications, El Lissitzky, El Lissitzky : Life, Letters, Texts (1967; 1980)

Age, Art, Problem

“Nuclear power started in weaponry. It was designed for war. And any instrument that has its origins in war always has the potential for war. First because the material you need to make bombs, you’re multiplying it though nuclear power, you’re taking uranium and turn it into plutonium. Second by equipping governments and private companies with this potential, in society you spread this potential, that here is a weapon of mass destruction available. This is exactly what happened with fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers came from explosive factories are increasingly used in terrorist attacks.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

On nuclear power, as quoted in " Koodankulam Must Be Stopped: Vandana Shiva http://www.dianuke.org/koodankulam-must-be-stopped-vandana-shiva/", DiaNuke (29 May 2012)

War

“Chemists think in the highly visual nanoscopic world of atoms and molecules, but they work in the tangible world of macroscopic laboratory apparatus. These two approaches to the chemical sciences cannot be divorced.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 1 : The Atom in Modern Chemistry

World, Thinking, Science

“Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 8.15

Food, Fish

“Cybernetics is concerned primarily with the construction of theories and models in science, without making a hard and fast distinction between the physical and the biological sciences. The theories and models occur both in symbols and in hardware, and by 'hardware* we shall mean a machine or computer built in terms of physical or chemical, or indeed any handleable parts. Most usually we shall think of hardware as meaning electronic parts such as valves and relays. Cybernetics insists, also, on a further and rather special condition that distinguishes it from ordinary scientific theorizing: it demands a certain standard of effectiveness. In this respect it has acquired some of the same motive power that has driven research on modern logic, and this is especially true in the construction and application of artificial languages and the use of operational definitions. Always the search is for precision and effectiveness, and we must now discuss the question of effectiveness in some detail. It should be noted that when we talk in these terms we are giving pride of place to the theory of automata at the expense, at least to some extent, of feedback and information theory.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.2

Search, Motivation, Question, Thinking

“Dalton, the mathematical tutor, following up the lead of Newton, combined the whole of the results of quantitative measurement which had accumulated up to his time, in a comprehensive theory, based on the concept of the chemical atom.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Mathematics, Time

“In my creation/evolution ministry, I say there are only two philosophies of health and medicine; creation and evolution. If evolution is true, your body's a collection of chemicals that got together by chance over billions of years, so you treat diseases by adding more chemicals. That's the whole philosophy behind the drug therapy; you have a pain? Take a pill. The other, totally different philosophy is "hey, you're created by God, and he designed the food, and the herbs (Psalm 104:14)."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

The herbs are for the service of man, and so you treat, or you prevent problems with what you eat. Dr. Kent Hovind Intro to Mary Tocco's info on the dangers of Vaccinations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BJvPcHGFGI, Youtube (April 9, 2016)

God, Pain, Health, Disease

“Inevitably, whenever Israel takes action to protect themselves against openly genocidal Arab terror gangs, the accusations start bubbling up from antisemitic sewers that Israel is using diabolical weapons never seen before by mankind, evil chemicals that cause bizarre mutations and/or mysterious wounds.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

July 27, 2006 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21802&only

Evil

“As a rabbi I am often called upon to determine the kashrut of various food products and institutions. I am appalled by the number of chemicals that are added to our food, and long for the days when one did not need a degree in chemistry in order to understand what one was eating. From my perspective, I'm tempted to brand all food additives as treif, and hail as glatt kosher only those fruits and vegetables that are organically grown.”

Bonnie Koppell American rabbi

Source: Vegetarianism, p. 38

Food, Understanding

““I believe in God,” says my nan, in a way that makes the idea of an omnipotent, unifying frequency of energy manifesting matter from pure consciousness sound like a chore. An unnecessary chore at that, like cleaning under the fridge. I tell her, plucky little seven-year-old that I was, that I don’t. This pisses her off. Her faith in God is not robust enough to withstand the casual blasphemy of an agnostic tot. “Who do you think made the world, then?” I remember her demanding as fiercely as Jeremy Paxman would later insist I provide an instant global infrastructure for a post-revolutionary utopia. “Builders,” I said, thinking on my feet. This flummoxed her and put her in a bad mood for the rest of the walk. If she’d hit back with “What about construction at a planetary or galactic level?” she’d’ve had me on the ropes. At that age I wouldn’t’ve been able to riposte with “an advanced species of extraterrestrials who we have been mistakenly ascribing divine attributes to due to our own technological limitations” or “a spontaneous cosmic combustion that contained at its genesis the code for all subsequent astronomical, chemical, and biological evolution.” I probably would’ve just cried. Anyway, I’m supposed to be explaining the power of forgiveness, not gloating about a conflict in the early eighties in which I fared well against an old lady. Since getting clean from drugs and alcohol I have been taught that I played a part in the manufacture of all the negative beliefs and experiences from my past and I certainly play a part in their maintenance. I now look at my nan in another way. As a human being just like me, trying to cope with her own flaws and challenges. Fearful of what would become of her sick daughter, confused by the grandchild born of a match that she was averse to. Alone and approaching the end of her life, with regret and lacking a functioning system of guidance and comfort. Trying her best. Taking on the responsibility of an unusual little boy with glib, atheistic tendencies, she still behaved dutifully. Perhaps this very conversation sparked in me the spirit of metaphysical inquiry that has led to the faith in God I now have.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, God, Alcohol, Age

“We had a large old-fashioned battery, a wet cell, in the kitchen, hooked up to an electric bell. The bell was too complicated to understand at first, and the battery, to my mind, was more immediately attractive, for it contained an earthenware tube with a massive, gleaming copper cylinder in the middle, immersed in a bluish liquid, all this inside an outer glass casing, also filled with fluid, and containing a slimmer bar of zinc. It looked like a miniature chemical factory of sorts, and I thought I saw little bubbles of gas, at times, coming off the zinc. The Daniell cell (as it was called) had a thoroughly nineteenth-century, Victorian look about it, and this extraordinary object was making electricity all by itself—not by rubbing or friction, but just by the virtue of its own chemical reactions.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), p. 160

Fashion, Understanding, Time

“How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Estrogen (pg. 160)
The Whole Woman (1999)

Women, Men, Way, Question

“Even when I was doing chemical engineering, I was working almost full time for Reliance. I finished college at 2.30 pm and went straight to the office. I remember, we were raided and my father was in the US.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Always invest in businesses of the future and in talent

Time

“… after the war, he became a big proponent of the argument that chemical warfare or gas warfare was actually a more humane form of warfare than shrapnel and bombs, because he saw what all those shrapnel and bombs did to all the boys who climbed out of the trenches and tried to cross no man's land, with German machine guns and artillery on the other side, he said I'll take the gas any day. I'm not making the case for gas warfare, but the idea that getting killed by gas is, more horrible than getting ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets is not one I buy. And when I see the Obama administration putting pictures of people killed by gas up on the internet, I say "let's put pictures of the people who got killed by shrapnel up there, and lets have a debate about which pictures look worse."”

John Mearsheimer (1947) American political scientist

It won't even be an interesting debate, getting killed by shrapnel, in my opinion is a lot more gruesome and a lot worse. John Mearsheimer on America Unhinged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwqqzh59sVo provided by the Center for the National Interest. The bold text is Mearsheimer speaking about B. H. Liddell Hart's experience with chemical warfare, and the rest is of his opinion of it.

War, People, Boy, Idea

“Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 39

Men

“Saying that a smoker inhales over 4000 chemicals is as meaningful as saying that fun runners pass over 4000 different kinds of rock, and because that rock may contain dinosaur fossils, said fun runners are at risk of velociraptor attack.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

21 March 2007
Fully Ramblomatic

“Whenever anybody that I trusted brought along some new chemical, I would open my mouth and off I'd go.”

Ram Dass book Be Here Now

Be Here Now (1971)

“These considerations illustrate clearly that one of the problems is that of conceiving means for producing nuclides of sufficiently high mass numbers with half-lives long enough for chemical identification. Thus, the serious problem is again the paucity of starting materials.”

Glenn T. Seaborg (1912–1999) American scientist

"The Transuranium Elements : Present Status" Nobel Lecture (12 December 1951) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1951/seaborg-lecture.html Context: I suppose that I should say a few words with respect to the possibility for future production and identification of additional transuranium elements, especially in view of the possibility of their production by heavy-ion bombardment of transuranium elements. As an aid to such a program the radioactive properties can be estimated, as I have already indicated, on the assumption of a smooth nuclear energy surface and the systematics of radioactivity. Again, I must emphasize that such considerations are negated in the event that a stable subshell of 148 neutrons should be found to exist, and this must be regarded as a definite possibility. It is interesting to note that our considerations on the systematics of spontaneous fission28 indicate that this method of decay will not compete seriously with radioactive decay until the region just beyond element 100. … These considerations illustrate clearly that one of the problems is that of conceiving means for producing nuclides of sufficiently high mass numbers with half-lives long enough for chemical identification. Thus, the serious problem is again the paucity of starting materials.

Problem

“Every breath you draw, every accelerated beat of your heart in the emotional periods of your oratory depend upon highly elaborated physical and chemical reactions and mechanisms which nature has been building up through a million centuries.”

Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenist

As quoted in the closing address by Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, president of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, at the Memorial Service for Osborn at St. Bartholomew's Church, N.Y. (18 December 1935); published in "Henry Fairfield Osborn", Supplement to Natural History, Vol. 37, no. 2 (February 1936), p. 133 
Context: Every breath you draw, every accelerated beat of your heart in the emotional periods of your oratory depend upon highly elaborated physical and chemical reactions and mechanisms which nature has been building up through a million centuries. If one of these mechanisms, which you owe entirely to your animal ancestry, were to be stopped for a single instant, you would fall lifeless on the stage. Not only this, but some of your highest ideals of human fellowship and comradeship were not created in a moment, but represent the work of ages.

Nature, Heart, Drawing, Dependency

“The earliest applications of chemical processes were concerned with the extraction and working of metals and the manufacture of pottery.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

A Short History of Chemistry (1937)
Context: The earliest applications of chemical processes were concerned with the extraction and working of metals and the manufacture of pottery.... The irruption of an iron using race or races into Mediterranean sites... introduced the Iron Age... but many of the oldest arts still survived in almost their original form. The potter, for example, still used nearly the same materials and appliances as Neolithic man.

“Intelligent design itself does not have any content… Much of what I've written about has been in reaction to the materialist superstition, the belief that the universe is a purely material phenomenon that can be reduced to physical and chemical laws. It's a concept that's infected the social sciences as well.”

George Gilder (1939) technology writer

Replies when he asked the reasons why he supported the Intelligent Design movement, in his interview with the Boston Globe (27 July 2005)
Context: I'm not pushing to have [ ID ] taught as an alternative to Darwin, and neither are they... What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content... Much of what I've written about has been in reaction to the materialist superstition, the belief that the universe is a purely material phenomenon that can be reduced to physical and chemical laws. It's a concept that's infected the social sciences as well.

Law, Intelligence, Universe, Science

“That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden. An intricate web has been woven, a delicate fabric of chemical-electrical-seed-tissue=organism=species. A dancing, joyous harmony of energy transactions is rooted in the 12 inches of topsoil which covers the rock
metal
fire
core of this planet.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

The Purpose of Life is Religious Discovery
Start your own Religion (1967)

Dance

“The earliest chemical theory was qualitative in the strictest sense”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
Context: The earliest chemical theory was qualitative in the strictest sense; the so-called Aristotelean doctrine of the four elements assumed that air, water, earth, and fire, were qualities impressed on a primal matter; and the changes of material bodies were explained by the assumption that properties could be taken up by, and impressed upon, or removed from, the base-stuff. Transmutation as a possibility followed at once, and centuries of vain endeavour were required to impress the fact of its impossibility, leading to the true concept of element.

Sense

“These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of Nature herself is a mere simulacrum.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Drugs and the Meaning of Life http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life/ (5 July 2011) 2010s Context: I have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. The positive experiences were more sublime than I could have ever imagined or than I can now faithfully recall. These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of Nature herself is a mere simulacrum. It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and to be amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it. Positive psychedelic experiences often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be—and for most of us, normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of these deeper possibilities... But as the peaks are high, the valleys are deep. My “bad trips” were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever suffered—and they make the notion of hell, as a metaphor if not a destination, seem perfectly apt.

Beauty, Art, Nature

“Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

The Psychedelic Experience (1995)
Context: A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

“The strife was stilled, order and unity were restored, as soon as Avogadro's great idea was seen in its true light, and the concept of the molecule was introduced into chemistry. A formula which had required pages of reasoning from a purely chemical standpoint to establish, and that insecurely, was fixed by a single numerical result.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
Context: As an instance of the remarkably far-reaching effect which a single mathematico-physical concept has had upon the development of chemical theory, one has but to recall the state of chemistry just before the revival of Avogadro's law by Cannizzaro, to be impressed by its confusion. Relying solely upon their "chemical instinct," the leaders of the various schools of chemical thought had developed each his own theoretical system.... a host of... conceptions strove for supremacy. The strife was stilled, order and unity were restored, as soon as Avogadro's great idea was seen in its true light, and the concept of the molecule was introduced into chemistry. A formula which had required pages of reasoning from a purely chemical standpoint to establish, and that insecurely, was fixed by a single numerical result.

Idea, Light

“The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes.”

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) American electrical engineer and science administrator

Source: Science is Not Enough (1967), p. 28 - 29
Context: We puzzle as to whether the universe is bounded or extends forever; whether, indeed, it may only be one universe among many. We speculate as to whether our universe began in a vast explosion, whether it pulsates between utter compression and wide diffusion, whether it is self-renewing and thus unchanged forever. And we are humble.
But science teaches more than this. It continually reminds us that we are still ignorant and there is much to learn. Time and space are interconnected in strange ways; there is no absolute simultaneity. Within the atom occur phenomena concerning which visualization is futile, to which common sense, the guidance from our everyday experience, has no application, which yield to studies by equations that have no meaning except that they work. Mass and energy transform one into another, Gravitation, the solid rock on which Newton built, may be merely a property of the geometry of the cosmos. Life, as its details unfold before us, becomes ever more intricate, emphasizing more and more our wonder that its marvelous functioning could have been produced by chance and time. The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes.
And what is the conclusion? He who follows science blindly, and who follows it alone, comes to a barrier beyond which he cannot see. He who would tell us with the authority of scholarship a complete story of why we exist, of our mission here, has a duty to speak convincingly in a world where men increasingly think for themselves. Exhortation needs to be revised, not to weaken its power, but to increase it, for men who are no longer in the third century. As this occurs, and on the essential and central core of faith, science will of necessity be silent.
But its silence will be the silence of humility, not the silence of disdain. A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is overdefined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life.

“Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide. It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

Linus Pauling In His Own Words (1995) by Barbara Marinacci, p. 29.
1990s
Context: Just think of the differences today. A young person gets interested in chemistry and is given a chemical set. But it doesn't contain potassium cyanide. It doesn't even contain copper sulfate or anything else interesting because all the interesting chemicals are considered dangerous substances. Therefore, these budding young chemists don't get a chance to do anything engrossing with their chemistry sets. As I look back, I think it is pretty remarkable that Mr. Ziegler, this friend of the family, would have so easily turned over one-third of an ounce of potassium cyanide to me, an eleven-year-old boy.

Thinking, Personality

“The results of a scrutiny of the materials of chemical science from a mathematical standpoint are pronounced in two directions. In the first we observe crude, qualitative notions”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
Context: The results of a scrutiny of the materials of chemical science from a mathematical standpoint are pronounced in two directions. In the first we observe crude, qualitative notions, such as fire-stuff, or phlogiston, destroyed; and at the same time we perceive definite measurable quantities such as fixed air, or oxygen, taking their place. In the second direction we notice the establishment of generalizations, laws, or theories, in which a mass of quantitative data is reduced to order and made intelligible. Such are the law of conservation of matter, the laws of chemical combination, and the atomic theory.

Mathematics, Science

“Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Return Trip to Nirvana from Sunday Telegraph (1967).
Context: I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.

Confidence, Nature

“It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion.”

William Crookes (1832–1919) British chemist and physicist

Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion. But, as we have just seen, minimized beings would be unable to produce fire at will, except by certain chemical reactions, and would have little opportunity of examining its nature. They might occasionally witness forest fires, volcanic eruptions, etc.; but such grand and catastrophic phenomena, though serving to reveal to our supposed Lilliputians the existence of combustion, would be ill suited for quiet investigation into its conditions and products. Moreover, considering the impossibility they would experience of pouring water from one test tube to another, the ordinary operations of analytical chemistry and of all manipulations depending on the use of the pneumatic trough would remain forever a sealed book.

“What Hubble discovered was the expansion of the universe…. We are not expanding. Nor is Brooklyn. Nor is earth. Nor is the solar system. Nor, in fact, is the Milky Way galaxy. Nor even those aggregates of thousands of galaxies that we call "galaxy clusters." These collections of matter are bound together by chemical and gravitational forces between their constituents—forces that are stronger than the force of expansion.”

John D. Barrow (1952–2020) British scientist

The Origin of the Universe (1997)

Way, Universe

“The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all - the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

People, World, Nature, Affliction

“A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow.”

Michael Burleigh (1955) American historian and writer

Source: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror (2006), p. 415

Way, Communication, Understanding, Thinking

“Film and television essentially feel the same when you’re doing it, because it’s the same technical approach. All the homework is the same. The homework for each medium is all similar, but the gratification in a live theater context is much higher, because it’s immediate. It’s far more dangerous, because there are no retakes. It’s electric, it’s an actual chemical transaction that occurs between you and the audience. Whatever energy you’re throwing out to them they throw it right back to you, and it kind of feeds on itself in this vacuum…”

Benjamin Bratt (1963) American actor

On acting in various mediums in “Interview: Benjamin Bratt” https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-Benjamin-Bratt-6673.html in Cinema Blend

Feeling

“Consciousness arises with, or out of, and accompanies, these clay compounds called creatures, but it does not cause, nor in any way interfere with, their phenomena. If it were possible to construct artificial clods, chemically as accomplished as philosophers, but without any accompanying consciousness, these soulless mechanisms, without will, feeling, or conscious intelligence, simply acting out their chemical and physical affinities, would not behave otherwise in any infinitesimal particular than the real, conscious meditators on things.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Derivation of the Nature of Living Beings, pp. 200–201

Way, Feeling, Intelligence

“We are… bound to attach the greatest importance to the preliminary step taken by Lavoisier, who is even more justly called the father of modern chemistry than Kepler is called the father of modern astronomy. The exact claims of Lavoisier to this important place in the history of chemistry have been variously stated: …since his time, and greatly through his labours, the quantitative method has been established as the ultimate test of chemical facts; the principle of this method being the rule that in all changes of combination and reaction, the total weight of the various ingredients—be they elementary bodies or compounds—remains unchanged. The science of chemistry was thus established upon an exact, a mathematical basis. By means of this method Lavoisier, utilising and analysing the results gained by himself and others before him, notably those of Priestley, Cavendish, and Black, succeeded in destroying the older theory of combustion, the so-called phlogistic theory.”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=xqwQAAAAYAAJ (1903)

History, Mathematics, Science, Change

“It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

"I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that."
"Well, I wouldn't say it in public."
"Cohen," the assistant attorney general of an unnamed East Coast state meeting covertly with Sangamon Taylor near the Jersey Shore. Chapter 11
Zodiac (1988)

People

“A sane society would be asking questions about the very nature of a society and culture that creates so much trauma for children.... We live in a society that prioritizes profits for large corporations and power for large institutions. We live in a society in which, for example, the cause of depression and suicide has been, for decades, falsely attributed by psychiatry and Big Pharma to a chemical imbalance theory long known to be untrue—an untruth that has made billions of dollars for drug companies and increased power for psychiatry through increased use of antidepressants which are known to actually increase suicide... just one of many examples that we do not live in a sane society.”

Bruce E. Levine American psychologist

The Groundbreaking Public Health Study That Should Change U.S. Society—But Won’t https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/19/the-groundbreaking-public-health-study-that-should-change-u-s-society-but-wont/, (19 July 2019)

Children, Question, Nature, Suicide

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Quotes about chemical
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