The 1,000 Wisest Things Ever Said E-Book

David Pratt

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been the hallmark of genius, but Nobel laureates tend to be more than merely brilliant - their idealism, courage and concern for humanity have also made them sources of inspiration and insight. The 1,000 Wisest Things Ever Said is a fascinating collection of quotes from the winners of this most prestigious award. It also includes short biographical sketches of each of the laureates quoted and a brief history of the Nobel Prize. Astute, witty and poignant by turns, these insightful nuggets will inspire and charm, and are a delightful, thought-provoking look at the world through the eyes of some of its wisest men and women.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgements

THE QUOTATIONS

Achievement

Achievement

Work

The Nobel Prize

Beliefs

Beliefs

Meaning and Significance

Truth and Falsehood

Ideas

Ideals

Ideology

Religion

Materialism

Time, Life and Death

Time

Life and Lifespan

Youth and Age

Death and Mortality

Epitaphs and Eulogies

History and the Past

The Future

Human Qualities

Good and Evil

Character and Self-concept

Courage and Heroism

Duty and Responsibility

Compassion

Forgiveness

Conformity and Eccentricity

Stupidity

Emotions

Joy and Happiness

Affirmation and Gratitude

Beauty

Pain and Grief

Indifference

Hope and Despair

Fear

Human Relations

Love and Affection

Marriage

Sex

Women and Men

Children and Families

Friendship

Solitude and Loneliness

Mind, Knowledge and Learning

Thinking and Thought

Intellect and Reason

Insanity

Genius and Talent

Knowledge and Imagination

Memory and Oblivion

Dreams and Nightmares

Philosophy

Ethics and Morals

Critics and Criticism

Wisdom

Fanaticism

Schools and Teachers

Arts and Culture

The Arts and Artists

Language and Literature

Writers and Writing

Poets and Poetry

Books

The Media

Places

America and the Americans

Britain and the British

Germany and the Germans

Russia and the Russians

France and the French

Israel

The Third World

Heaven and Hell

Home and the Homeland

Politics and Economics

Politics and Politicians

Government

Democracy

Tyranny and Dictatorship

Revolution

Terrorism

Freedom

Justice

Racism

Marxism and Communism

Patriotism

Economics

Wealth and Poverty

Science and Technology

Science and Scientists

Physics

The Universe

Evolution

Genetics

The Environment

Mathematics

Technology

Medicine and Health

Medicine

Food and Hunger

Drink and Drugs

War and Peace

War and Conflict

Armies and Armaments

Nuclear Weapons

The Holocaust

Peace and Peacemaking

Last Words

References

Appendix 1. Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prizes

Appendix 2. Biographies of Nobel Laureates Quoted

Appendix 3. Nobel Laureates, 1901–2012

Index

Copyright

PREFACE

For more than a century, the Nobel Prize has been the hallmark of genius. The lives and the work of the 768 men and women who have won the prize since the first prizes were awarded in 1901 show that this popular impression is not misplaced. What makes the Nobel laureates not merely interesting but inspiring is the fact that their intellectual brilliance is commonly accompanied by qualities of humanity and idealism. Not only are they extraordinary minds; they are extraordinary people, whose observations on a wide range of issues are of intrinsic interest.

The Nobel Foundation has, over the past century, carried out Alfred Nobel’s wishes to honour ‘those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind’. The benefits that this group of less than a thousand people has conferred on humanity are prodigious. Millions of lives have been saved or bettered by the work of Nobel laureates in medicine who gave us radium therapy, antibiotics, insulin, antidepressants, bone marrow and organ transplants, cardiac catheterisation, the diphtheria serum and the measles vaccine. Nobel Peace Prize winners played important roles in ending both World Wars, as well as the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Vietnam War and the Cold War. Less historically visible are the tragedies and conflicts that have been prevented by the dedicated work of individual laureates and of Nobel Prize-winning organisations such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Nobel laureates pioneered many technical inventions, often persevering for years in the face of apathy or derision by colleagues and the public. Their inventions include X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, transistors, semiconductors, integrated circuits, lasers and the electron microscope. And the world would be spiritually and aesthetically poorer without the writers who gave us such works as Lord of the Flies, Dr Zhivago, Waiting for Godot, The Tin Drum, The Waste Land, The Forsyte Saga, The Old Man and the Sea, The Jungle Book, Man and Superman and Of Mice and Men.

In many of the quotations in this collection, Nobel laureates speak about their specialised work. Physicists comment with perception or irony on physics, poets on poetry. But laureates also address, often with great insight, issues outside their immediate specialisation – in fact, they tend to be versatile in their interests. The conventional image of the Nobel Prize winner as an absent-minded genius, eccentric in habits and solitary in lifestyle, fits hardly any of them.

A number of laureates were publicly prominent in their time. They include three Presidents of the United States and numerous Presidents and Prime Ministers of other nations. When they speak of public events, they do so from a privileged position. ‘History will be kind to me,’ Winston Churchill averred, ‘for I intend to write it.’1

Music may serve as an example of the versatility of many laureates. Among the physicists, for example, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg were both concert-level pianists. Gerald Edelman played the violin in a symphony orchestra, Gerhard Herzberg was a noted bass-baritone, Albert Einstein’s attachment to his violin is well known, and Richard Feynman would, at every opportunity, exercise his virtuosity on the bongo drums. Other Nobel laureates have excelled in sports. Niels Bohr was a football player, Dudley Herschbach a high school American football star, Philip Noel-Baker ran in three Olympic Games, Max Perutz was a skier and mountaineer, and Henry Kendall was a scuba diver who lost his life on a National Geographic diving expedition. Ernest Hemingway once remarked, ‘My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything.’2

With their high energy and restless minds, Nobel laureates are people whose tastes and interests are rarely limited to a single field. Thus we find the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa remarking, ‘Ah, but it’s impossible to live without poetry.’3 Or Einstein rushing to embrace the young violinist Yehudi Menuhin after a concert in Berlin in 1930 and saying, ‘Now I know there is a God in Heaven.’4

Einstein is the best-known science laureate, and his many observations, both whimsical and profound, are frequently quoted in anthologies. Otherwise, the scientists tend to be neglected in such collections in favour of a few well-known literature laureates. In this collection, close to half of the laureates represented earned the prize in one of the sciences. The 1,000 Wisest Things Ever Said includes quotations from seventy-three laureates who won the prize for Literature, fifty-three for Peace, forty-five for Physics, forty-three for Medicine, twenty-four for Chemistry and eighteen for Economics. As will be seen from the quotations from the science laureates, many of them are highly articulate individuals who think deeply about matters of general concern. Working as they do at the frontiers of knowledge – exploring the mysteries of the cosmic, the subatomic and the organic worlds – they have much to tell us not only about science but about many of the significant issues of our time.

In these pages laureates from different fields share their views on such topics as belief and religion, good and evil, joy and grief, ethics and morals. Many thousands of documents were perused in the compilation of this collection: novels, plays and poetry; biographies and autobiographies; scientific papers and monographs; newspaper reports and interviews; letters, journals, lectures and Web pages.

Anyone who studies the lives of the laureates quickly recognises that they do not escape the hardships and tragedies that are the lot of humankind. Indeed, they often seem to have suffered more than their share of difficulties. Several lost one or both parents in childhood, and a sizeable minority grew up in poverty. The wars of the twentieth century took beloved sons from Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, William Henry Bragg and Robert Aumann. A large number of the scientists became refugees from Nazi Germany, and many others became exiles from their homelands. Of the laureates represented here, at least thirty endured the experience of prison, whether as prisoners of war such as Konrad Lorenz and Jean-Paul Sartre, civilian internees like Albert Schweitzer or James Chadwick, prisoners of conscience such as Bertrand Russell and Aung San Suu Kyi, or inmates of concentration camps such as Roald Hoffmann and Elie Wiesel. Almost all of them, at one time or another, experienced discouragement or setbacks in their careers.

When Nobel laureates write of their work in literature, peace, economics or science, they write of what they know firsthand. But very often, when they speak of prison and exile, communism and fascism, war and terrorism, success and failure, duty and courage, or dreams and nightmares, they likewise speak not from theory or speculation but with the voice of experience. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are the beneficiaries of a hundred years of insights and discoveries that Nobel laureates achieved with pain and effort. They constitute a source of wisdom that compels our attention.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the Nobel Foundation to use its photographs of the laureates from the Nobel Museum. This is a virtual museum that contains more than 30,000 documents, including biographies and autobiographies of Nobel laureates, their acceptance speeches and their Nobel lectures. It has been an invaluable resource.

I would like to acknowledge a particular debt to three authors whose work I have found especially valuable: István Hargittai (five books in his Candid Science series; The Road to Stockholm, 2002; Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist, 2004); Louise S. Sherby (The Who’s Who of Nobel Prize Winners, 1901–2000, 4th ed., 2002); and Tyler Wasson (Nobel Prize Winners, 1983, and supplements). For interested readers, these works can be recommended as a rich source of information about a truly remarkable company of men and women.

I wish to thank Michael Pratt, MD, and Timothy Pratt, PhD, for their help with the biographies of scientists.

The final shape of the book owes much to the gifted help of Hugh Brewster. Most important, Beverley Slopen of the Slopen Agency had faith in the project from the beginning and has been an unfailing source of encouragement. To all of these people I express my warmest thanks.

ACHIEVEMENT

The supreme achievement of a Nobel Prize is almost invariably the reward for supreme effort. Whether in science, medicine, economics, literature or peace, Nobel laureates are, almost without exception, men and women who have persisted in their endeavours regardless of setbacks, discouragement and failures. We owe the development of penicillin, Prozac, Viagra, the diphtheria serum, vitamin therapy, organ transplants, the measles and mumps vaccines and innumerable other medical advances to Nobel laureates whose persistence drove them to conduct repeated experiments in the face of failure and scepticism. Writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Beckett and Naipaul refused to be discouraged by early rejection and apathy. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn are well known for the official persecution they endured, but many other Nobel writers suffered without being defeated by neglect, censure, exile and imprisonment. And if the world is a slightly safer place today than it was a half-century ago, this is partly due to the tenacity and dedication of the men and women who have been honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Such commitment springs in large part from passion for their vocations. Most Nobel laureates find their mission in life early and never abandon it. Arbitrary retirement age rarely stops them or even slows them down. An exception was Frederick Sanger, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 and again in 1980. He worked at his bench in the laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge up to the eve of his retirement at age sixty-five, at which point he closed the door of his laboratory and left science completely in favour of gardening.

But the traditional image of the workaholic genius matches few Nobel laureates. While some have worked exclusively in a single specialised area, others have excelled in more than one field. Many laureates served with distinction as soldiers or with wartime resistance organisations. Others nurtured private excellence in sports or music. And the biographies of most of them reveal these men and women as individuals marked by personal charm and integrity.

Something of the character of Nobel Prize winners is manifested by their reactions on winning the award. Despite the fanfare, the pomp and circumstance of the award ceremonies and the expectation of the media that new Nobels will have informed opinions on everything within and outside their subject, modesty rather than arrogance characterises the response of the prize winners. Laureates from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University claim that the main benefit of the prize is the lifetime right to one of the ‘Reserved for NL’ parking spaces. An incident involving Glenn Seaborg is illustrative. At a US Senate hearing in 1970, an elderly senator from Louisiana asked Seaborg sarcastically, ‘What do you know about plutonium?’ With admirable restraint, Seaborg gave a ‘vague but reassuring answer’. He was the discoverer of plutonium.

ACHIEVEMENT

1. The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.

Fridtjof NansenPEACE, 1922

2. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel BeckettLITERATURE, 1969

3. All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

William FaulknerLITERATURE, 1949

4. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Ernest HemingwayLITERATURE, 1954

5. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.

Boris PasternakLITERATURE, 1958

6. Have you not succeeded? Continue! Have you succeeded? Continue!

Fridtjof NansenPEACE, 1922

7. I don’t believe I have special talents. I have persistence… After the first failure, second failure, third failure, I kept trying.

Carlo RubbiaPHYSICS, 1984

8. I think and think for months and years, ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Albert EinsteinPHYSICS, 1921

9. Just take a risk. Go for it. I think if you crash and burn trying, it’s still going to be better than if you never tried at all.

Roderick MacKinnonCHEMISTRY, 2003

10. Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.

Aung San Suu KyiPEACE, 1991

11. I have, despite all disillusionment, never, never allowed myself to feel like giving up. This is my message today; it is not worthy of a human being to give up.

Alva MyrdalPEACE, 1982

12. The greatest joy of life is to accomplish. It is the getting, not the having. It is the giving, not the keeping. I am a firm believer in the theory that you can do or be anything that you wish in this world, within reason, if you are prepared to make the sacrifices, think and work hard enough and long enough.

Frederick BantingMEDICINE, 1923

13. Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Winston ChurchillLITERATURE, 1953

WORK

14. Work is the only good thing.

John SteinbeckLITERATURE, 1962

15. Work is the only thing that gives substance to life.

Albert EinsteinPHYSICS, 1921

16. Without a vocation, man’s existence would be meaningless.

Anwar al-SadatPEACE, 1978

17. Happiness depends on one being exactly fitted to the nature of one’s work.

Alexis CarrelMEDICINE, 1912

18. Those whose work and pleasure are one … are … Fortune’s favoured children.

Winston ChurchillLITERATURE, 1953

19. When I ask myself, ‘Who are the happiest people on the planet?’ my answer is, ‘Those who can’t wait to wake up in the morning to get back to what they were doing the day before.’

James CroninPHYSICS, 1980

20. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and no stronger link with the world than his work.

Max DelbrückMEDICINE, 1969

21. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Theodore RooseveltPEACE, 1906

22. All the people who do well work very hard. Nobody who has a record of achievement has been lazy about it.

Sidney AltmanCHEMISTRY, 1989

23. Nothing is going to happen unless you work with your life’s blood.

Riccardo GiacconiPHYSICS, 2002

24. I am a very lucky person, and the harder I work, the luckier I seem to be.

Alan MacDiarmidCHEMISTRY, 2000

25. All my life I’ve been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard.

Glenn SeaborgCHEMISTRY, 1951

26. Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The former is unpleasant and badly paid. The latter is pleasant and well paid.

Bertrand RussellLITERATURE, 1950

27. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries.

Wisława SzymborskaLITERATURE, 1996

28. A situation where people can grow old without having a job that rewards them individually while adding to the collective well-being is morally unacceptable.

Franco ModiglianiECONOMICS, 1985

29. After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

Joseph BrodskyLITERATURE, 1987

30. The intellect of man is forced to choose. Perfection of the life, or of the work.

William Butler YeatsLITERATURE, 1923

31. The human worker will go the way of the horse.

Wassily LeontiefECONOMICS, 1973

THE NOBEL PRIZE

32. I had never, ever thought of winning the Nobel Prize. That is really true. I had grown up never expecting to get my name in the newspapers without doing something wicked.

Eugene WignerPHYSICS, 1963

33. In any case, let’s eat breakfast.

Isaac BashevisSingerLITERATURE, 1978

To his wife, on hearing he had won the Nobel Prize

34. Almost instantly the phone rang again. He had heard me just as he’d hung up. ‘Congratulations, Dr Mullis. I am pleased to be able to announce to you that you have been awarded the Nobel Prize.’ ‘I’ll take it!’ I said.

Kary MullisCHEMISTRY, 1993

35. I didn’t do this work; the young people in the lab did it. I just made the coffee and sharpened the pencils.

Peter AgreCHEMISTRY, 2003

36. I was delighted too when I heard about the Nobel Prize, thinking as you did that my bongo playing was at last recognised.

Richard FeynmanPHYSICS, 1965

37. What am I supposed to be, a pompous fool because I got a medal?

Jody WilliamsPEACE, 1997

38. Local geriatrics were going, ‘What’s a Nobel? Is that a bagel?’

Derek WalcottLITERATURE, 1992

39. In my whole life since my kids became teenagers, this is the first time they’ve come home and said, ‘Dad, my friends think this is so cool.’

Peter AgreCHEMISTRY, 2003

40. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen … I know of no other place where Princes assemble to pay their respect to molecules… Because of you, our wives hesitate for just an instant before summoning us to do the dishes.

John PolanyiCHEMISTRY, 1986

41. As a child, I wanted to be a physicist. I begged my mother to let me go to Tokyo to study physics. I promised I would win the Nobel Prize for Physics. So, fifty years later, I returned to my village and said to my mother, ‘See, I have kept my promise. I won the Nobel Prize.’ ‘No,’ said my mother, who has a very fine sense of humour, ‘You promised it would be in physics!’

Kenzaburo OeLITERATURE, 1994

42. It is as good as going to one’s funeral without having to die first.

Emily BalchPEACE, 1946

On reading her Nobel nominations

43. It is really very, very nice for a week. It would corrupt you utterly if it lasted much longer.

Milton FriedmanECONOMICS, 1976

Of the Nobel celebration in Stockholm

44. The Prize is also wonderful for the individual. I’ve jokingly said it’s like being given a lifetime depot injection of Prozac.

Alfred GilmanMEDICINE, 1994

45. People keep e-mailing me to ask, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ And they want me to e-mail them back quickly with an answer!

David BaltimoreMEDICINE, 1975

46. Oh, no, I was afraid of that! I better go and hide.

Torsten WieselMEDICINE, 1981

47. This is the end of me. This is fatal. I cannot live up to it.

Sinclair LewisLITERATURE, 1930

48. The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

T. S. EliotLITERATURE, 1948

49. If you’re not careful, the Nobel Prize is a career-ender. If I allowed myself to slip into it, I’d spend all my time going around cutting ribbons.

Daniel McFaddenECONOMICS, 2000

50. If I could explain it in three minutes, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.

Richard FeynmanPHYSICS, 1965

51. If I knew what leads one to the Nobel Prize, I wouldn’t tell you, but go get another one.

Robert LaughlinPHYSICS, 1998

52. You too can win Nobel Prizes. Study diligently. Respect DNA. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Avoid women and politics. That’s my formula.

George BeadleMEDICINE, 1958

53. You people think it’s hard to win a Nobel Prize, but it’s easy. Trivial. Just put protons and antiprotons in a box, and shake them up, and then collect your prize.

Carlo RubbiaPHYSICS, 1984

To colleagues at Harvard University

54. A deal is a deal. It’s hard to be unpleasant after winning a prize like that.

Robert LucasECONOMICS, 1995

The clause in the divorce settlement of Lucas and his wife read, ‘Wife shall receive 50 per cent of any Nobel Prize’ if won within seven years of their divorce on 31 October 1988. Lucas’s prize was announced on 10 October 1995, so he had to split the $600,000

55. Some have extolled the use of frozen sperm from judiciously chosen donors. Some have even praised the sperm of Nobel Prize winners. Only if one does not know Nobel laureates would one want to reproduce them like that.

François JacobMEDICINE, 1965

56. I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

William FaulknerLITERATURE, 1949

57. Why, that’s a hundred miles away. That’s a long way to go just to eat.

William FaulknerLITERATURE, 1949

Explaining why he declined President Kennedy’s invitation to dinner with forty-nine Nobel laureates

BELIEFS

Alfred Nobel’s will directed that the prizes be awarded to persons ‘who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind’. This humanitarian ethos has been maintained by the Nobel selection committees. While Nobel laureates represent all shades of political, religious and social belief, idealism and humanitarianism are general characteristics.

Few laureates could be described as extremist in their beliefs. Only a minuscule number have at any time been doctrinaire Communists or Fascists. A minority are passionate in their religious belief, a similar minority in their atheism. Insofar as Nobel laureates share a set of beliefs, these would be belief in their work, in the welfare of humanity, in freedom and in the search for truth.

BELIEFS

58. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible, and those who believe that ‘belief’ must be discarded and replaced by ‘the scientific method’.

Max BornPHYSICS, 1954

59. Someone who believes everything he is told simply can’t be a scientist, but someone who believes nothing will wind up in jail or prematurely buried.

Luis AlvarezPHYSICS, 1968

60. I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgement.

William GoldingLITERATURE, 1983

61. Human beings … are far too prone to generalise from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition.

Francis CrickMEDICINE, 1962

62. I certainly do not believe in this superstition. But you know, they say it does bring luck even if you don’t believe in it!

Niels BohrPHYSICS, 1922

In answer to a visitor’s question about the horseshoe above the door of his country cottage

63. I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

Pearl S. BuckLITERATURE, 1938

64. I believe in God – in spite of God! I believe in Mankind – in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future – in spite of the Past!

Elie WieselPEACE, 1986

MEANING AND SIGNIFICANCE

65. What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.

François JacobMEDICINE, 1965

66. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

Albert CamusLITERATURE, 1957

67. I believe that I am not responsible for the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of life, but that I am responsible for what I do with the life I’ve got.

Hermann HesseLITERATURE, 1946

68. The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

Niels BohrPHYSICS, 1922

69. Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Albert EinsteinPHYSICS, 1921

70. I have one life and one chance to make it count for something… My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.

Jimmy CarterPEACE, 2002

71. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Jacques MonodMEDICINE, 1965

72. In roadside ditches, in washed-out trenches, among the ruins of burned houses, he learned the value of a can of soup, an hour of quiet, the meaning of true friendship, of life itself.

Alexandr SolzhenitsynLITERATURE, 1970

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD

73. The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Nadine GordimerLITERATURE, 1991

74. With the beginning of life, comes the thirst for truth, whereas the ability to lie is gradually acquired in the process of trying to stay alive.

Gao XingjianLITERATURE, 2000

75. Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it.

André GideLITERATURE, 1947

76. Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.

Romain RollandLITERATURE, 1915

77. Science has nothing to do with any dogma. Science ceases to exist when there is a dogma.

Jean-Marie LehnCHEMISTRY, 1987

78. It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

Anatole FranceLITERATURE, 1921

79. I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science… This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.

Max BornPHYSICS, 1954

80. Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Winston ChurchillLITERATURE, 1953

81. The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels BohrPHYSICS, 1922

82. No deep truth has ever been shouted.

Juan Ramón JiménezLITERATURE, 1956

83. A man may say, ‘From now on I’m going to speak the truth.’ But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even done speaking.

Saul BellowLITERATURE, 1976

84. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

T. S. EliotLITERATURE, 1948

85. Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

Nadine GordimerLITERATURE, 1991

86. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Czeslaw MiłoszLITERATURE, 1980

87. A person obsessed with ultimate truth is a person asking to be relieved of money.

Robert LaughlinPHYSICS, 1998

88. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

Alexandr SolzhenitsynLITERATURE, 1970

89. Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true, and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels.

Albert CamusLITERATURE, 1957

90. The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

V. S. NaipaulLITERATURE, 2001

91. In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions – infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.

Cordell HullPEACE, 1945

To the Japanese ambassador, who brought a note to Secretary of State Hull immediately after Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941

92. Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.

Czeslaw MiłoszLITERATURE, 1980

93. As I was standing in the drawing-room at Trinity, a clergyman came in. And I said to him: ‘I’m Lord Rutherford.’ And he said to me, ‘I’m the Archbishop of York.’ And I don’t suppose either of us believed the other.

Ernest Rutherford, CHEMISTRY, 1908

IDEAS

94. I’m enough of an academic to believe that ideas are even more powerful than nuclear weapons.

John PolanyiCHEMISTRY, 1986

95. For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope.

Albert EinsteinPHYSICS, 1921

96. As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that everyone thinks him silly, so that he remains obscure and is soon forgotten. Then, gradually, the world becomes ready for his idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit.

Bertrand RussellLITERATURE, 1950

97. How do you get good ideas? You have a lot of ideas and throw out the bad ones.

Linus PaulingCHEMISTRY, 1954; PEACE, 1962

98. Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John SteinbeckLITERATURE, 1962

99. The only way I can tell that a new idea is really important is the feeling of terror that seizes me.

James FranckPHYSICS, 1925

100. I distrust scientists who complain about others stealing their ideas – I have always had to force new ideas down people’s throats.

Max PerutzCHEMISTRY, 1962

101. There’s a saying among scientists, that you don’t know you’ve got a really good idea until at least three Nobel laureates have told you it’s wrong.

Paul LauterburMEDICINE, 2003

102. No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

Frederick BantingMEDICINE, 1923

IDEALS

103. You must begin with an ideal and end with an ideal.

Frederick BantingMEDICINE, 1923

104. Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.

John GalsworthyLITERATURE, 1932

105. Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Bertrand RussellLITERATURE, 1950

106. We are not asked to subscribe to any utopia or to believe in a perfect world. We are asked to equip ourselves with courage, hope, readiness for hard work and to cherish large and generous ideals.

Emily BalchPEACE, 1946

107. They call us romantics, weak, stupid, sentimental idealists, perhaps because we have some faith in the good which exists even in our opponents and because we believe that kindness achieves more than cruelty.

Fridtjof NansenPEACE, 1922

108. The ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth.

Albert EinsteinPHYSICS, 1921

IDEOLOGY

109. One of the important distinctions between ideology and science is that science recognises the limitations on what one knows.

Joseph StiglitzECONOMICS, 2001

110. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

Alexandr SolzhenitsynLITERATURE, 1970

111. I don’t know whose crime is worse, the establishment intellectual or the intellectual who trots out ideological dogma.

Wole SoyinkaLITERATURE, 1986

112. Bid farewell to ideologies and instead return to the truth of being human.

Gao XingjianLITERATURE, 2000

113. Now that the cruel utopias that bloodied our century have vanished, the time has come at last to begin a radical, more human reform of liberal capitalist society.

Octavio PazLITERATURE, 1990

114. After the collapse of socialism, capitalism remained without a rival. This unusual situation unleashed its greedy and – above all – its suicidal power. The belief is now that everything – and everyone – is fair game.

Günter GrassLITERATURE, 1999

115. Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

Thomas MannLITERATURE, 1929

116. Any anti-Communist is a dog.

Jean-Paul SartreLITERATURE, 1964

117. By ‘radical’, I understand one who goes too far; by ‘conservative’, one who does not go far enough; by ‘reactionary’, one who won’t go at all.

Woodrow WilsonPEACE, 1919

118. It is time to fight the fashionable notion that self-fulfilment, the development of one’s personality and fulfilment of one’s wishes at no matter what cost to one’s family, friends, colleagues, and community, should be man’s or woman’s ultimate aim.

Max PerutzCHEMISTRY, 1962

RELIGION

119. Man is man because he can recognise supernatural realities, not because he can invent them.

T. S. EliotLITERATURE, 1948

120. Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Eugene O’NeillLITERATURE, 1936

121. I think only an idiot can be an atheist.

Christian AnfinsenCHEMISTRY, 1972

122. I was merely an electrician and the only things I had were my belief in God, and my belief in what I was doing.

Lech WałęsaPEACE, 1983

123. We have to recognise that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

John EcclesMEDICINE, 1963

124. We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

T. S. EliotLITERATURE, 1948

125. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Albert EinsteinPHYSICS, 1921

126. Religion is very different from science… When you play the piano, when you climb a mountain, does this contradict your scientific endeavours? … In science we have certain ways of thinking about the world, and in religion we have different ways of thinking about the world. Those two things coexist side by side without conflict.

Robert AumannECONOMICS, 2005

127. Wherever we may look, far and wide, we nowhere find a contradiction between religion and natural science. Quite the contrary, precisely on the decisive points we find complete agreement.

Otto HahnCHEMISTRY, 1944

128. I do not believe that anyone should ever say that science agrees with religion. What I would say, which I think is a far more powerful statement, and one which allows people to be religious, is to say, the modern observations of science do not disagree with religion.

Arno PenziasPHYSICS, 1978

129. I consider the power to believe to be one of the great divine gifts to man through which he is allowed in some inexplicable manner to come near to the mysteries of the Universe without understanding them.

Ernst ChainMEDICINE, 1945

130. The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science.

Albert EinsteinPHYSICS, 1921

131. I feel that my faith and my scientific work have mutually reinforced each other… The wondrous experience of understanding, perhaps understanding for the first time, something about the natural world is a deep religious experience.

Walter KohnCHEMISTRY, 1998

132. Being an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian seems perfectly natural to me.

William PhillipsPHYSICS, 1997

133. Whether or not God is dead, it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.

Elias CanettiLITERATURE, 1981

134. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.

Steven WeinbergPHYSICS, 1979

135. I think in many respects religion is a dream – a beautiful dream often. Often a nightmare. But it’s a dream from which I think it’s about time we awoke.

Steven WeinbergPHYSICS, 1979

136. I can believe in God’s wisdom but I cannot see his mercy.

Isaac Bashevis SingerLITERATURE, 1978

137. The Churches and the Faith have really done too much harm! … While there’s a breath left in me I shall cry ‘No!’ to the Churches.

André GideLITERATURE, 1947

On his deathbed

138. Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

George Bernard ShawLITERATURE, 1925

139. We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.

Jimmy CarterPEACE, 2002

Talk to a Bible class

140. Turn your face to God and he becomes light but turn your face away from him and he becomes darkness.

William GoldingLITERATURE, 1983

141. Whenever I’m in trouble, I pray. And because I’m in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.

Isaac Bashevis SingerLITERATURE, 1978

142. It is a fact – and I saw it with my own eyes – that man in his downfall has nothing to lean on, nothing to solace him, except faith. The NKVD brought many back to the religious fold… Lukishki nights taught us that faith takes better care of man, when things go badly with him, than man does of his faith when things are well with him.

Menachem BeginPEACE, 1978

143. I have lived, and continue to live, in the belief that God is always with me. I know this from experience. In August of 1973, while exiled in Japan, I was kidnapped from my hotel room in Tokyo by intelligence agents of the then military government of South Korea. The news of the incident startled the world. The agents took me to their boat at anchor along the seashore. They tied me up, blinded me, and stuffed my mouth. Just when they were about to throw me overboard, Jesus Christ appeared before me with such clarity. I clung to him and begged him to save me. At that very moment, an airplane came down from the sky to rescue me from the moment of death.

Kim Dae-jungPEACE, 2000