John B. S. Haldane Quotes
-
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
→ -
The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern.
→ -
I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.
→ -
We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.
→ -
Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch, and being killed with an automatic pistol or shell in place of a dagger or a battle-axe.
→ -
It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.
→ -
We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
→ -
It wasn't until I had performed by first autopsy that I realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them in my imagination.
→ -
Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.
→ -
I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.
→ -
The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.
→ -
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
→ -
You can analyze a glass of water and you're left with a lot of chemical components, but nothing you can drink.
→ -
The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
→ -
Until politics are a branch of science, we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.
→ -
Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.
→ -
This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.
→ -
My practise as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.
→ -
The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".
→ -
You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
→ -
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.
→ -
I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.
→ -
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
→ -
The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.
→ -
The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder
→ -
I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.
→ -
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.
→ -
Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. "What inference," asked the latter, "might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?" Haldane replied: "An inordinate fondness for beetles."
→ -
So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.
→ -
An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.
→
Related Authors
-
Ernst Mayr Biologist -
John Maynard Smith Geneticist -
George E. P. Box Statistician -
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist -
Francesco Redi Physician -
Ronald Fisher Statistician -
Harold Urey Chemist -
Theodosius Dobzhansky Geneticist -
Charles Darwin Naturalist -
John Desmond Bernal Physicist -
Julian Huxley Film director -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Andrew Soltis Author -
Thomas Huxley Biologist -
Karl Pearson Mathematician -
Naomi Mitchison Novelist -
Louis Pasteur Chemist -
William Bateson Geneticist -
Francis Galton Polymath -
