Quotes about physics (2746 quotes, page 7)

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Does not appear to be from any of his books or cited in a biography. A Google Books search shows that the oldest book citing "physics is like sex" is Scary Monsters and Bright Ideas (2000) by science broadcaster Robyn Williams. On p. 44, this book claims: "Einstein said, 'You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother'. Richard Feynman added, 'Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it'." Given that Einstein didn't really say the former, it's likely that Feynman didn't really say the latter.
Disputed and/or attributed
Variant: Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

Sex

“If by religion, we are understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, "that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, "something not fit to be named, even indeed, a hell."”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams, 5 May 1817, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Lipscomb-Bergh edition, 1903), Volume XV, p. 109
1810s

World , Religion , Hell , Understanding

“The security services are alarmed. Every nation that does research into fundamental physics — what we call experimental theology — is turning to its scientists urgently to discover what's going on. Because they know that something is happening. And they suspect it has to do with other worlds.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Sir Charles to Mrs. Coulter in Ch. 9 : Theft
His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997)

World

“I do not see any reason to assume that the heuristic significance of the principle of general relativity is restricted to gravitation and that the rest of physics can be dealt with separately on the basis of special relativity, with the hope that later on the whole may be fitted consistently into a general relativistic scheme. I do not think that such an attitude, although historically understandable, can be objectively justified. The comparative smallness of what we know today as gravitational effects is not a conclusive reason for ignoring the principle of general relativity in theoretical investigations of a fundamental character. In other words, I do not believe that it is justifiable to ask: What would physics look like without gravitation?”

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

1950s, On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation (1950)

Hope , Understanding , Thinking

“That statement can not be too much emphasized. The country's growth has compelled the Federal establishment to exceed by far the Government plants of even the greatest States. With this growth in physical extent, in revenue, in personnel, there has inevitably been the suggestion that the Federal Government was overshadowing the States. Yet the State governments deal with far more various and more intimate concerns of the people than does the National Government. All the operations of the minor civil divisions, parishes, wards, school districts, towns, cities, counties, and the like, are dependencies of the State. The maintenance of order through police, the general business of enforcing law, is left to the States. So is education.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People , Education , School , Law

“I was hanging out the other night with a bunch of friends I've known forever. They were saying, "Look at you. You've grown into a swan." I looked at them and said, "My awkward phase lasted about three years longer than all of yours combined." I related to the physical and emotional awkwardness Mia goes through. She has incredibly low self-esteem. A lot of my life was spent having the same thing, but I'm getting over that now.”

Anne Hathaway (1982) American actress

As quoted in "Anne Hathaway : Royal Role" by Jeffrey Epstein at E! Online (20 July 2001)

Life , Night

“I love filmmaking when fate is a part of the process and you are dependent on the laws of physics and the elements to get a single moment that transports or in some way creates an illusion even for a moment. I think that is tremendous fun and what I think filmmaking is, catching lightning in a bottle. I feel like we are so used to CGI now and thank god because it is a wonderful tool, but there is an element of everything you are looking at has been created in the comfort of a studio. I want to return to a world where I can celebrate when you are really interacting with the world.”

Larry Fessenden (1963) American actor, producer, writer, director, film editor, and cinematographer

Interview with 'Beneath' director Larry Fessenden https://www.axs.com/interview-with-beneath-director-larry-fessenden-92769 (March 25, 2014)

Love , God , Fate , World

“In the second and third exiles we have served as a living protest against greed and hate, against physical force, against "might makes right!"”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

Preface to Idishé Bibliotek, i. 1890.

Hate

“Remarkably, the building of the Standard Model — the theory of how particles and forces interact — was the success of the conservatives. It required no revolution at the foundational level. Normal physics, the kind that goes on experiment after experiment, produced the Standard Model.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"Waiting for the Revolution" https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130524-waiting-for-the-revolution/, an interview of David Gross by Peter Byrne, Quanta Magazine (2013)

Success

“Good breeding in cattle depends on physical health, but in men on a well-formed character.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 151
Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 354; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment 57"
Variant: Strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man.
Variant: In cattle excellence is displayed in strength of body; but in men it lies in strength of character.

Men , Health , Dependency

“No map contains all the information about the territory it represents. The road map we get at the gasoline station may show all the roads in the state, but it will not as a rule show latitude and longitude. A physical map goes into details about the topography of a country but is indifferent to political boundaries. Furthermore, the scale of the map makes a big difference. The smaller the scale the less features will be shown.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 85
1950s

Country , Indifference

“As far as the physical miseries go, I am sure I will cope. I lived at Eton in the 1950s and I know all about life in uncomfortable quarters.”

Jonathan Aitken (1942) Conservative Member of Parliament, former British government Cabinet minister

On how he might cope with prison, as quoted in Daily Express (19 January 1999).

Life

“I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Missed Opportunities (1972)

Marriage , Mathematics , Past

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

Art , Nature , Knowledge , Study

“"It is my contention that if a large body of strong healthy men do not exist as a pool of hope for the race, then the race has no chance to survive. If twenty million starved neurotics manage to live through the plague, does this mean that humanity survives?" He paused, throwing the question at them and waiting until they formed their own answer. Then he shouted, "No, it does not! What is humanity, a physical form only? I say it is more. It is intellect and reason and dignity. It is these qualities that must survive, not the mere number of twisted sickly bodies."”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Rebellers (1963), p. 79

Men , Hope , Question , Strong

“I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold on to physical reality.
We are … all aware of the situation regarding what will turn out to be the basic foundational concepts in physics: the point-mass or the particle is surely not among them; the field, in the Faraday-Maxwell sense, might be, but not with certainty. But that which we conceive as existing ("real") should somehow be localized in time and space. That is, the real in one part of space, A, should (in theory) somehow "exist" independently of that which is thought of as real in another part of space, B. If a physical system stretches over A and B, then what is present in B should somehow have an existence independent of what is present in A. What is actually present in B should thus not depend the type of measurement carried out in the part of space A; it should also be independent of whether or not a measurement is made in A.
If one adheres to this program, then one can hardly view the quantum-theoretical description as a complete representation of the physically real. If one attempts, nevertheless, so to view it, then one must assume that the physically real in B undergoes a sudden change because of a measurement in A. My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion.
However, if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I don't see at all what physics is supposed to be describing. For what is thought to be a "system" is after all, just conventional, and I do not see how one is supposed to divide up the world objectively so that one can make statements about parts.”

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

"What must be an essential feature of any future fundamental physics?" Letter to Max Born (March 1948); published in Albert Einstein-Hedwig und Max Born (1969) "Briefwechsel 1916-55", and in Potentiality, Entanglement and Passion-at-a-Distance: Quantum Mechanical Studies for Abner Shimony, Volume Two edited by Robert Cohen, Michael Horn, and John Stachel (1997), p. 121 http://books.google.com/books?id=DsNoIcQemTsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q&f=false
1940s

World , Reality , Sense , Change

“When a castaway collapses from hunger and thirst it is fear of physical want rather than a real want, they say. Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost.”

Kóbó Abe book The Woman in the Dunes

Part 2, Ch. 18
The Woman in the Dunes (1962)

Hunger , Fear

“The Hindu mind works in such a way that continuity of worship is more important than physical fact. When the Harappans migrated eastward towards the Gangetic region, they carried with them their memories of the Sarasvati. The myths and sanctity were transferred to Prayag.”

Michel Danino (1956) Indian writer

Supporting the claim that the divine attributes of the Ganges were originally used for the Sarasvati river, as quoted in " A personal odyssey http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/a-personal-odyssey/article391403.ece, The Hindu (10 April 2010)

Way , Memory

“The only excuse that America can ever have for the assertion of her physical force is that she asserts it in behalf of the interests of humanity.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech http://books.google.com/books?id=5jIwAAAAYAAJ&q=%22The+only+excuse+that+America+can+ever+have+for+the+assertion+of+her+physical+force+is+that+she+asserts+it+in+behalf+of+the+interests+of+humanity%22&pg=PA23#v=onepage to the Daughters of the American Revolution at Memorial Continental Hall in Washington, D.C. on April 17, 1916
1910s

“On oilrigs men who only work an 8-hour day are contemptuously called nine-to-fivers. In stark contrast, women are more likely not to take risks, even when the risks are minimal. What's the message to our sons? Our praise of our sons when they risk physical danger teaches them that a willingness to be physically abused creates love. Abuse-as-love? Yes.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 39.

Love , Women , Men

“[T]he psychic and physical characteristics of human beings, and the differences between individuals, are the consequence of an interaction between the genes that are present in the fertilized egg and the sequence of environmental circumstances that the developing organism experiences during its entire life history. With a few exceptions, like cystic fibrosis where possession of the defective genotype leads ineluctably to the disease, or language acquisition where the language spoken depends only on experience and not at all on genotype, human characteristics are all subject to this interaction of forces. There are, moreover, random events in cell growth and differentiation that are neither genetic nor environmental in the usual sense, and which play an extremely important part in development, especially in behavioral traits.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

Life , Disease , Behavior , History

“There's nothing worse than a violent beating from an unremarkable person. Physical violence with someone is too much like shagging them. Too much id involved.”

Irvine Welsh book The Acid House

A Smart Cunt: A Novella, "Associates as Opiates" (Chapter 3).
The Acid House (1994)

Personality

“The physicist needs a facility in looking at problems from several points of view. The exact analysis of real physical problems is usually quite complicated, and any particular physical situation may be too complicated to analyze directly by solving the differential equation. But one can still get a very good idea of the behavior of a system if one has some feel for the character of the solution in different circumstances. Ideas such as the field lines, capacitance, resistance, and inductance are, for such purposes, very useful. … On the other hand, none of the heuristic models, such as field lines, is really adequate and accurate for all situations. There is only one precise way of presenting the laws, and that is by means of differential equations. They have the advantage of being fundamental and, so far as we know, precise. If you have learned the differential equations you can always go back to them. There is nothing to unlearn.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 2, "Differential Calculus of Vector Fields"; section 2-1, "Understanding physics"; p. 2-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Law , Way , Behavior , Feeling

“During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Introductory p.2
A Budget of Paradoxes (1872)

Mathematics , Knowledge

“I became a vegetarian in 1969. … About eight and a half years ago, my husband and I decided to stop eating meat and then about six months later we stopped eating fish. … Partly because of my attitude towards health, and partly because of my husband's attitude toward animals. He's such an avid animal lover that, slaughtering them for food, he felt, was a worthless endeavor. I came to it from the point of view of someone who likes to be healthy, energetic, and vital. Together we both came to the same conclusions, but from different viewpoints, and eventually our reasons began to mingle. I began to share his attitude about animals and he began to appreciate the physical rewards of being a vegetarian. … I had two beautiful births as a vegetarian; they were great labors—no bleeding, no complications, no problems. The diet worked perfectly for me.”

Susan Saint James (1946) American actress and activist

Interview in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1979), pp. 46–47.

Health , Food , Beauty , Lovers

“Physical things are perceptual things. They also arise within the act… It is in the operation with these perceptual or physical things which lie within the physiological act short of consummation that the peculiar human intelligence is found.”

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist

George Herbert Mead (1927;314), as cited in: Marcus Persson (2007), Mellan människor och ting. En interaktionistisk analys av samlandet, p. 19

Lie , Intelligence

“Like so many other great observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists, he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognising their existence though doubting their respectability.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Problem , Past

“In the second year of my residence in Gottingen, I entered my name for a course of lectures on practical physics, against the advice of all my friends, but I have never regretted so doing, as there never has been, and probably never will be, a greater man at the university than Doctor Schroder, physician to the king, who gave, at that period, his celebrated lectures on practical physics. Schroder himself was astonished at the step I had taken; but when he perceived that I fully understood him, I became one of his favourite pupils; nor had I the advantage alone of receiving private lessons gratis, but he took me with him in most of his professional visits, where I had all the advantages of his great practice. Thus I caught a putrid fever which was then very prevalent; Schroeder attended me day and night, and giving up all hopes of my recovery, he observed to one of his friends, not thinking that I understood what he said, "The expansion of the sinews increases." "Then," answered I, in a quiet manner, "I shall die in four days, according to such and such a rule of Hippocrates: pray, prepare my father to receive the news of my death." However, immediately after, a sudden turn in the disorder taking place, I soon recovered; not so my memory, which I lost for a time, so that I had forgotten the names of my best friends; my nerves were so completely shaken, that I had no wish to recover. After my recovery, Professor Schroeder being himself attacked with the same fever, requested of his wife that no other physician than myself should attend him; but when he became light-headed, she called in all the physicians of Gottingen, and these gentlemen not agreeing in opinion respecting the treatment of the patient, this great and learned man fell a victim to ignorance and jealousy, April 21, 1772. I cannot think of this celebrated and good man without shedding tears of regret and gratitude.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Death , Jealousy , Hope , Thinking

“Physics seems to have done reasonably well in studying electrons, although there is not to this day a precise definition of this term.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Source: Image and Mind. 1980, p. 470

Study

“Sam is the only person I've ever physically threatened on a set.”

Charlton Heston (1923–2008) American actor

On working with director Sam Peckinpah, as quoted in "(Westerns Channel Begins Production on Original Documentary Focusing on Western Films of Legendary Director Sam Peckinpah" (29 August 2003) https://archive.is/20130628092918/www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-24232345_ITM

Personality

“One of the noblest characteristics which distinguish modern civilization from that of remoter times is, that it has enlarged the mass of our conceptions, rendered us more capable of perceiving the connection between the physical and intellectual world, and thrown a more general interest over objects which heretofore occupied only a few scientific men, because those objects were contemplated separately, and from a narrower point of view.”

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer

Equinoctial Regions of America (1814-1829)

Men , World , Time

“While this day was legally established many years ago as an occasion to be devoted to the memory of our country's dead, it can not but each year refresh the sentiment of respect and honor in which our country holds their living comrades. Of those great armies that maintained the long struggle from 1861 to 1865, which ranked in size with any the world had ever before seen, but a few shattered ranks now remain. The old valor yet lives. The old devotion to country, the old loyalty to the flag remain: But the youth and physical vigor which caused them to be characterized as the boys in blue are gone from these heroes of a former generation.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

Youth , World , Boy , Memory

“I'm so physically deficient that the act of sleep injures me. It's like I disprove evolution and intelligent design at once.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=050915

Intelligence , Sleep

“Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

War , Religion , Art , Way

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist

As quoted in Rutherford at Manchester (1962) by J. B. Birks
Unsourced variants:
That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.
Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.
That which is not measurable is not science. — (which is also attributed to Lord Kelvin)

Science

“They got a building down New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning.”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

Alice's Restaurant Massacree

Night

“Two normal observers viewing the same object from the same place under the same physical circumstances do not necessarily have identical visual experiences, even though the images on their respective retinas may be virtually identical.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 1, Science as knowledge derived form the facts of experience, p. 5.

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law , Behavior , Search , Fashion

“A generous relationship rarely knows dramas. One is happy when the partner is happy. And one is happy when growing on three levels: on the physical level, which gives love, material things, and protection; on the inner level— through compassion and wisdom—which provides the motivation for development; and on a deep-lying, secret level where both partners enrich themselves with the qualities of the other and increasingly find their center.”

Lama Ole Nydahl (1941) Danish lama

Buddha & Love: Timeless Wisdom for Modern Relationships (2012)

Love , Wisdom , Secret , Lying

“It’s a women’s issue, but a lot of the women wouldn’t be having abortions if the men would step up and be a part of what they are already biologically a part of. Raising children and having children, even though the women birthed the child, is designed for two people to do it. And there is so much undue stress and pressure on the woman if the other one isn’t there. So, really one thing we do is say it’s a woman’s issue, forcing the woman to have to deal with it on her own, so that way men don’t have to. As a man, I am going to passive-aggressively tell you you are in control, when really I am just telling you that because it makes my life easier, cause that way I don’t have to step up and make a decision. I obviously think that a man has just as much invested in that child as the woman does. He need to be there to support her through the physical changes of the pregnancy, and help and provide emotional strength, and do it together. As much as he has a role in making the baby in the first place, it needs to take both of them the whole way through. Any idea that a man doesn’t have a role in it is not true, and is simply more about politics and making a man’s life easier.”

Benjamin Watson (1980) gridiron football player

Benjamin Watson Interview, Part Two http://turningpointfriends.org/benjamin-watson-interview-part-two/

Life , Women , Men , Children

“Bare Attention consists in a bare and exact registering of the object. This is not as easy a task as it may appear, since it is not what we normally do, except when engaged in disinterested investigation. Normally man is not concerned with a disinterested knowledge of “things as they truly are,” but with “handling” and judging them from the viewpoint of his self-interest, which may be wide or narrow, noble or low. He tacks labels to the things which form his physical and mental universe, and these labels mostly show clearly the impress of his self-interest and his limited vision. It is such an assemblage of labels in which he generally lives and which determines his actions and reactions.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 32

Knowledge , Universe , Appearance

“For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions.”

Anthony Bourdain book The Nasty Bits

The Nasty Bits (2006)

Beer , Nature

“Not eating. To not get fat. I lost about 15 pounds for the role because I wanted to get a sense of what it’s like to be hungry and what it does to your brain and your physical state. It was extremely tough to not be eating as much.”

Liam Hemsworth (1990) Australian actor

Hemsworth on discussing most difficult part of preparing for role for The Hunger Games. — [Hemsworth craved meaty part, Boston Herald, Stephen Schaefer, March 20, 2012, 28, 29; volume 30, issue80]

Sense

“Many people would argue that the most dangerous inhabitant of the earth is currently the self styled 43rd president of the United States. Not so much in deed anymore as in word. Because to hear that man speak is to wish upon yourself physical harm.”

John Oliver (1977) English comedian

John Oliver: Terrifying Times (2008)

People

“Dolphins read each other’s emotions by sonar and it’s the inside of the body, the configuration of the viscera, that lets dolphins know whether the dolphin they are meeting is tense or happy. Their emotions are much more connected with the insides of each other’s bodies. We don’t have that. It’s like denying 90% of what we are physically, not knowing it.”

David Cronenberg (1943) Canadian film director, screenwriter and actor

Bomb Magazine http://bombmagazine.org/article/1160/david-cronenberg, Bette Gordon.

Reading , Happiness

“There is no concept in the whole field of physics which is more difficult to understand than is the concept of entropy, nor is there one which is more fundamental.”

Francis Sears (1898–1975) American physicist

[Francis Weston Sears, Mechanics, heat and sound, Addison-Wesley principles of physics series Volume 1, 2nd Edition, Addison-Wesley Press, 1950, 447]

Understanding

“The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills.”

Ivar Ekeland (1944) French mathematician

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 8, The End of Nature, p. 162.

World , Law , Nature

“It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), p. 35

Way , Feeling , Imagination , Reality

“World peace is threatened not only by weapons of mass destruction but also by conventional weapons which have led to countless violations of human rights, including the rights to life and to physical integrity. A strong treaty can contribute greatly to international and regional peace, security and stability.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Statement by the United Nations (UN) Independent Expert about how countries must regulate arms trade to prevent human rights violations – http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=42578&Cr=Arms+Trade&Cr1#.UeWCAI2nq24.
2012

Life , World , Peace , Strong

“Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics. … The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium … discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay … The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics. … Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Law , Science , Speed

“There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body,2 the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain.3 But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes. There is a nearly similar contrast between the Malays and the Papuans,4 who live under the same physical conditions, and are separated from each other only by a narrow space of sea.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter VII: "On the Races of Man", page 216 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=238&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Disease , Light , Appearance , Heart

“Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense… I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion… I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans… Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!… Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty… State-run television stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones… The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom… The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization… The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions… The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive… These charlatans care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all… When I was given the news, I laughed. The trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true… President Bush has said, 'We refuse to live in fear.'…Beautiful sentence, very beautiful. I loved it! But inexact, Mr. President, because the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

A Sermon for the West">From "A Sermon for the West" By Oriana Fallaci - Oct. 22, 2002 Address to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute

Love , Death , People , Truth

“There is a subtle difference in the way sugar molecules are utilized. Momentarily, the body uses less sugar. However, sugar is important in fueling the consciousness on its journey. It also aids in connecting the consciousness to the body. In other words, there is indeed a connection that is and must be partially physical, between the body and the travelling consciousness, and it is based upon a certain sugar molecule in a form not normally seen. Before conscious projections I would therefore recommend that you take a small amount of starchy or sugar food. A small snack before bed is a good idea from this viewpoint. Alcohol is of some benefit, though not to any great degree. Excellent results can be achieved in a dream-based projection during the day, in a nap.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 348, quoting from Session 276

Alcohol , Food , Dreams , Way

“Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.”

Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) chemist and physicist from England

As quoted in American Journal of Physics, Vol. 14 | (1946), p. 248

Parting

“At the present time it is of course quite customary for physicists to trespass on chemical ground, for mathematicians to do excellent work in physics, and for physicists to develop new mathematical procedures… Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science.”

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Dynamics in Psychology, 1940, p. 116

Mathematics , Science , Time , Success

“To tell the indigenous inhabitants of Brixton or Southall or Leicester or Bradford or Birmingham or Wolverhampton, to tell the pensioners ending their days in streets of nightly terror unrecognisable as their former neighbourhoods, to tell the people of towns and cities where whole districts have been transformed into enclaves of foreign lands, that "the man with a coloured face could be an enrichment to my life and that of my neighbours" is to drive them beyond the limits of endurance. It is not so much that it is obvious twaddle. It is that it makes cruel mockery of the experience and fears of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary, decent men and women…In understanding this matter, the beginning of wisdom is to grasp the law that in human societies power is never left unclaimed and unused. It does not blow about, like wastepaper on the streets, ownerless and inert. Men's nature is not only, as Thucydides long ago asserted, to exert power where they have it: men cannot help themselves from exerting power where they have it, whether they want to or not…It is the business of the leaders of distinct and separate populations to see that the power which they possess is used to benefit those for whom they speak. Leaders who fail to do so, or to do so fast enough, find themselves outflanked and superseded by those who are less squeamish. The Gresham's Law of extremism, that the more extreme drives out the less extreme, is one of the basic rules of political mechanics which operate in this field: it is a corollary of the general principle that no political power exist without being used. Both the general law and its Gresham's corollary point, in contemporary circumstances, towards the resort to physical violence, in the form of firearms or high explosive, as being so probable as to be predicted with virtual certainty. The experience of the last decade and more, all round the world, shows that acts of violence, however apparently irrational or inappropriate their targets, precipitate a frenzied search on the part of the society attacked to discover and remedy more and more grievances, real or imaginary, among those from whom the violence is supposed to emanate or on whose behalf it is supposed to be exercised. Those commanding a position of political leverage would then be superhuman if they could refrain from pointing to the acts of terrorism and, while condemning them, declaring that further and faster concessions and grants of privilege are the only means to avoid such acts being repeated on a rising scale. This is what produces the gearing effect of terrorism in the contemporary world, yielding huge results from acts of violence perpetrated by minimal numbers. It is not, I repeat again and again, that the mass of a particular population are violently or criminally disposed. Far from it; that population soon becomes itself the prisoner of the violence and machinations of an infinitely small minority among it. Just a few thugs, a few shots, a few bombs at the right place and time – and that is enough for disproportionate consequences to follow.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Stretford Young Conservatives (21 January 1977), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 168-171
1970s

Life , Wisdom , Women , Men

“Questions at home and school should be decided in the light of the future. It is a process of toughening, but not the sort of false physical thing that we have called toughening. Our boys and girls ought to know that the bully type, the false "tough," has been the first to break down under the actual fire of battle. The quiet, the calm, the determined have made the best soldiers. Why? Obviously the bully is insecure in himself- he blusters to muster his own courage. Children ought to know that. They ought to be taught to retort to the bully, "You're a coward or you wouldn't make such a noise about being brave. The really brave man simply acts brave- he doesn't have to talk about it."”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: What America Means to Me (1943), p. 151-152

Children , School , Home , Girl

“For professional musicians, musicologists, and serious students, knowledge of the psychology of music is extremely valuable but sometimes hard to come by. In this practical and authoritative study which pulls together information from musicology, physics, physiology, psychology, and aesthetics the distinguished Hungarian psychologist Geza Revesz (1878 1955) offers a comprehensive view of the subject, including an overview of his own extensive, often revolutionary research in both music psychology and acoustics.”

Géza Révész (1878–1955) Hungarian psychologist and musicologist

Géza Révész, Introduction to the psychology of music. Courier Corporation, 1954. Abstract

Music , Knowledge , Study

“The moral authority of governors rests, in reality, on the self-interest of the governed. The latter having a natural tendency to resist anything harmful to their self-interest, unacknowledged authority would continually require the help of physical force.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 51

Nature , Reality , Help

“In this way, we influence the muscles of physiognomy [facial expression] and it is possible for us to arouse any passion or sentiment whatsoever; the contraction of the interconnected muscles, constituting “the anatomy of expression”, evokes in the brain of the hypnotised person certain impressions just as these, in the waking state, determine the whole facial expression. It is thus merely a reversal of the usual order [of causation] between the emotions and their physical expressions.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

Original Philosophy of Hypnotism The International College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy

Way , Passion , Personality

“To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success.
Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to many discussions of science, and their failures of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Preface

History , Failure , Nature , Problem

“Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist.
Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Ships Of Earth (1994)

People , Beauty , Thinking

“Why was progress in computing technology so fast compared with the lack of progress in space travel? The reason is very simple: computing technology is only now approaching scientific limits such as quantum uncertainty and the speed of light, while space technology has already run into its limits that derive from the basic principles of physics and chemistry.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 13, “The Future of Science: Surprises or Revolutions” (p. 210)

Travel , Light , Speed

“I have reexamined the contemporary reports and new evidence which has come to light since Maunder's time and conclude that this 70-year period was indeed a time when solar activity all but stopped. This behavior is wholly unlike the modern behavior of the sun which we have come to accept as normal, and the consequences for solar and terrestrial physics seem to me profound.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Behavior , Light , Time , Sun

“The consciousness of being human was fully developed in the cave man, of course, but the human conception was alive in the fish. We have spoken of mental genes. These are more or less psychic blueprints for physical matter, and in these mental genes existed the pattern for your type of self-consciousness.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 159, quoting from Seth Session 26

Fish

“Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer’s similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete
Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 154.

Art , Mathematics , Science

“Our mathematical concepts, structures, ideas have been invented as tools to organise the phenomena of the physical, social and mental world. Phenomenology of a mathematical concept, structure, or idea means describing it in its relation to the phenomena for which it was created, and to which it has extended in the learning process of mankind, and, as far as this description is concerned with the learning process of the young generation, it is didactical phenomenology, a way to show the teacher the places where the learner might step into the learning process of mankind.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. ix

World , Way , Mathematics , Idea

“We shall therefore assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system.”

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

Statement of the equivalence principle in Yearbook of Radioactivity and Electronics (1907)
1900s

“A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of ‘general systems theory’ which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.
It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems… The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism… hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content…”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

H.A. Simon (1962) "The Architecture of complexity." in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol 106, pp. 467-468. as cited in: "James Grier Miller (1916-)" at isss.org retrieved Nov 16, 2012.
1960s-1970s

Feeling , Search , Idea , Help

“As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book VII, 3
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Nature , Parting

“The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

La vie habituelle fait l'âme, et l'âme fait la physionomie.
Source: The Vicar of Tours (1832), Ch. II

Life , Soul

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life , Truth , School , Law

“Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.”

Chris Anderson book The Long Tail

Source: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Ch. 9, p. 163

“Specifically, in these days when brutal and murderous terrorism seeks to drive us apart, we must reiterate to ourselves – here, in the Knesset, in schools, in academia and in the halls of Torah study – that to be Jewish is democratic and democracy is Jewish. Only in this way can we know that brutal terrorism will not break us physically, or our spirit.”

Reuven Rivlin (1939) Israeli politician, 10th President of Israel

This bill strikes at Israel’s heart http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/bill-israel-judaism-democracy-president-israel-jewishness-reuven-rivlin, 27 November 2014

School , Way , Democracy , Study

“The realization that systems are integrated wholes that cannot be understood by analysis was even more shocking in physics than in biology. Ever since Newton, physicists had believed that all physical phenomena could be reduced to the properties of hard and solid material particles. In the 1920s, however, quantum theory forced them to accept the fact that the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve at the subatomic level into wavelike patterns of probabilities. These patterns, moreover, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. The subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can be understood only as interconnections, or correlations, among various processes of observation and measurement. In other words, subatomic particles are not “things” but interconnections among things, and these, in turn, are interconnections among other things, and so on. In quantum theory we never end up with any “things”; we always deal with interconnections.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 30.

“The doctrine of the cynics is the Ideal reversed, the parody of physical and moral beauty, the crime of mind, the degradation of imagination. I could not take pleasure in it. There was too much enthusiasm within me to permit me to crawl through those sinks of the brain. My nature had wings. The dangers to which I was exposed were above, not below.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book VI, Note V, p. 86
Les confidences (1849)

Pleasure , Beauty , Imagination , Nature

“Economics is a social science, not a physical science.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 1, Chapter 1, The Economy and Economics, p. 23
Economics For Everyone (2008)

Science

“Mathematics is merely a convenient tool by which the designer determines the physical proportions and details of a planned structure in order to transform his ideas… to the actuality of a finished structure.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Mathematics , Idea

“Faith and God belong together somewhat as sense experience and physical reality do.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960), p. 13

God , Faith , Reality , Sense

“While the new physics was developing in the 20th century, the mechanistic Cartesian world view and the principles of Newtonian physics maintained their strong influence on Western scientific thinking, and even today many scientists still hold to the mechanistic paradigm, although physicists themselves have gone beyond it.
However, the new conception of the universe that has emerged from modern physics does not mean that Newtonian physics is wrong, or that quantum theory, or relativity theory, is right. Modern science has come to realize that all scientific theories are approximations to the true nature of reality; and that each theory is valid for a certain range of phenomena.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Source: The Turning Point (1982), p. 93.

World , Nature , Thinking , Reality

“In the past several years, social work has increasingly focused on an ecological model. This model integrates both treatment and reform by conceptualizing and emphasizing the dysfunctional transactions between people and their physical and social environments. Human beings are viewed as developing and adapting through transactions with all elements of their environments. An ecological model gives attention to both internal and external factors. It does not view people as passive reactors to their environments but, rather, as being involved in dynamic and reciprocal interactions with them.”

Charles Zastrow (1942) American sociologist

Source: The practice of social work. (1995), p. 24

People , Past

“Through characters, non-linear plot lines, or the involvement of multiple dimensions, it ultimately witnesses the physical world as inextricable from consciousness or the observer of that world.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

World

“Why are the theories of physics so similar in their structure?”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

“The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i. e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture”

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Gene Amdahl, Gerrit Blaauw, and Fred Brooks (1964) " Architecture of the IBM System http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.7974&rep=rep1&type=pdf." in: IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol 8 (2) p. 87-101

Behavior

“I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I got lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me … from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching … a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn't fall for that either. I just felt, I had no reason to feel. Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn't feel turned on by them.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Love , Age , Making love , Feeling

“For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in a revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking 'revolutionary consciousness' or 'class consciousness,' it is an indispensable precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep people from thinking.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

People , Thinking

“The same way a pimp exploits the natural desire to be with the opposite sex… Psychics put people in spiritual harm, the same way pimps put people in physical harm.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

2001-10
Television series
Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher
ABC
Steve
Krakauer
Christine O'Donnell Thinks Psychics Are Evil Pimps
Mediaite
2010-09-15
http://www.mediaite.com/online/christine-odonnell-thinks-psychics-are-evil-pimps/
2010-11-01
Asked why James Van Praagh (also present) is so evil that Leviticus 20:27 says he should be stoned to death
TV appearances

People , Sex , Way , Nature

“Tactics hadn't gone [Rudd's] way – I had taken a view about something else forming the issue of the day – and after the tactics meeting broke up he very physically stepped into my space, and it was quite a bullying encounter. It was a menacing, angry, performance.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

Gillard recalls a tactics meeting held during the Rudd Opposition years; she was the Manager of Opposition Business in the House at the time.
The Killing Season, Episode one: The Prime Minister and his Loyal Deputy (2006–09)

Way

“Laplace made many important discoveries in mathematical physics… Indeed, he was interested in anything that helped to interpret nature. He worked on hydrodynamics, the wave propagation of sound, and the tides. In the field of chemistry, his work on the liquid state of matter is classic. His studies of the tension in the surface layer of water, which accounts for the rise of liquids inside a capillary tube, and of the cohesive forces in liquids, are fundamental. Laplace and Lavoisier designed an ice calorimeter (1784) to measure heat and measured the specific heat of numerous substances; heat, to them, was still a special kind of matter. Most of Laplace's life was, however, devoted to celestial mechanics.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 495

Life , Mathematics , Nature , Study

“That is all there is to it. No doubts, no discussion of earlier affairs, no to-ing and fro-ing, no physical experiment beyond a kiss, none of the complex voodoo which is thought necessary in even the most perfunctory modern novel to clap two ninnies together.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Kiss

“They [the critics] forget that while the artist never works outside his time yet his art will go on to be merged gradually into the new art of a new age. There will be no short stop. We shall not, contrary to the expectation of these people, hear of the sudden death of Cubism, abstraction, so-called modern art.... if they could but realize that energy is a spiritual movement and that they must conceive of working under a law of universal aesthetic progress, as we do in science, in mathematics, in physics.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Quote from: 'Stuart Davis', Arshile Gorky, in 'Creative Art 9', September 1931
1930 - 1941

Death , People , Age , Law

“I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked "What do you believe, doctor?", I began searching for answers.”

Francis S. Collins (1950) Geneticist; Director of the National Institutes of Health

cnn.com http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/

Life , Death , Truth , School

“I made a list of things that I might consider sin if the concept of sin were valid:
Number 1: Credulity, gullibility. I'd say that's a sin.
Voluntary willful ignorance. I'd say that's a sin.
Letting fear prevent you from understanding reality. I'd call that a sin.
Limiting the rights and freedoms of others in order to make them abide by your standards. That's a sin.
Sacrificing the mental, emotional and physical well-being of a child in deference to your religion. That's a sin.
Wasting the one and only life that you know you're going to have, worrying about and working for an afterlife that somebody told you might be there. That's a sin.”

Matt Dillahunty (1969) American activist

Episode 578: "Still More Scamlets" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDcLAeTm5AY, Channel Austin (November 9, 2008)
The Atheist Experience

Life , Fear , Religion , Understanding

“There can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign, oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically.”

Bobby Sands (1954–1981) Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army

Vol. Bobby Sands, Provisional Irish Republican Army (1981)
Other writings

People , Peace

“The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) rose to prominence when Robert A. Millikan was called to Pasadena in 1921 as new university president. Millikan was known for his far-reaching ambitions both as a physicist and as a science manager. He put CalTech on the map as a top university by inviting the world's most renowned scientists for guest lectures and by hiring internationally distinguished scientists to new chairs. With theoretical physicist Paul Epstein, a pupil of Sommerfeld's, Millikan brought modern atomic physics to CalTech in the early 1920s, and with Kármán, he pursued the same strategy a few years later in order to lure the best available aerodynamicist from Europe to Pasadena.”

Robert Andrews Millikan (1868–1953) American physicist

[Michael Eckert, The Dawn of Fluid Dynamics: A Discipline Between Science and Technology, https://books.google.com/books?id=GxIUCQ6Yai8C&pg=PA201, 27 June 2007, John Wiley & Sons, 978-3-527-61074-7, 201]

World , Universe , Science

“GQ: “Were you in love with Johnny Marr?”
M: “Sexually? Absolutely not. There was a love and it was mutual and equal but it wasn’t physical or sexual. There are lots of people post-Smiths who would like to make some dramatic homosexual story. There never was one. It’s often said that Johnny rescued me but he was also bobbing about in his own lifeboat.””

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From an interview by Adrian Deevoy in GQ http://s15.photobucket.com/albums/a366/gqarrific/, October 2005, p. 278
In interviews etc., About The Smiths

Love , People

“But one of the great disappointments of esoteric practice is that discovering reality is your own creation does not give you the power to change it permanently. However much physics you read, however many mystical writings you study, the world remains stubbornly solid. In theory, you should be able to build your next home by thinking it into existence. In practice, you still have to lay the bricks like anybody else.”

Herbie Brennan (1940) Irish Author

Source: Magical Use of Thought Forms (2001), p. 34

World , Disappointment , Home , Thinking

“Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology above the other sciences in the attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing explanation of nature or reality.”

Robert Lanza (1956) American medical doctor

A New Theory of the Universe:Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation, Spring, 2007, The American Scholar http://www.theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/,

Life , World , Way , Nature

“Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

As quoted in "Prophet of Decline" by Tunku Varadarajan, in The Wall Street Journal (23 June 2005)

Sense

“Then the war came, intensifying the native nationalistic sense of every race in the world. We found alien enemies in spirit among the native-born children of the foreign-born in America; we found old stirrings in the hearts of men, even when they were naturalized citizens, and a desire to take part in the world struggle, not as Americans, but as Jugo-Slavs or Czecho-Slovaks. We found belts and stockings stuffed with gold to be taken home, when peace should be declared, by men who will go back to work out their destinies in a land they thought never to see again. We found strong racial groups in America split into factions and bitterly arraigned against one another. We found races opposing one another because of prejudices and hatreds born hundreds of years ago thousands of miles away. We awoke to the fact that old-world physical and psychological characteristics persisted under American clothes and manners, and that native economic conditions and political institutions and the influences of early cultural life were enduring forces to be reckoned with in assimilation. We discovered that while a common language and citizenship may be portals to a new nation, men do not necessarily enter thereby, nor do they assume more than an outer likeness when they pass through”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: When the country first tried in 1915 to Americanize its foreign-born people, Americanization was thought of quite simply as the task of bringing native and foreign-born Americans together, and it was believed that the rest would take, care of itself. It was thought that if all of us could talk together in a common language unity would be assured, and that if all were citizens under one flag no force could separate them. Then the war came, intensifying the native nationalistic sense of every race in the world. We found alien enemies in spirit among the native-born children of the foreign-born in America; we found old stirrings in the hearts of men, even when they were naturalized citizens, and a desire to take part in the world struggle, not as Americans, but as Jugo-Slavs or Czecho-Slovaks. We found belts and stockings stuffed with gold to be taken home, when peace should be declared, by men who will go back to work out their destinies in a land they thought never to see again. We found strong racial groups in America split into factions and bitterly arraigned against one another. We found races opposing one another because of prejudices and hatreds born hundreds of years ago thousands of miles away. We awoke to the fact that old-world physical and psychological characteristics persisted under American clothes and manners, and that native economic conditions and political institutions and the influences of early cultural life were enduring forces to be reckoned with in assimilation. We discovered that while a common language and citizenship may be portals to a new nation, men do not necessarily enter thereby, nor do they assume more than an outer likeness when they pass through.

Life , Men , War , Children

Quotes about physics page 7

Quotes about physics
page 7