On Ethics
“Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.”
Frank Herbert
“The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a
discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.”
H. L. Mencken
“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”
George Washington
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is
dangerous and dreadful."”
Samuel Johnson
“The foundation of all morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up
pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible
propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.”
Thomas Henry Huxley
“If you tell the truth, you do not have to remember anything.”
Mark Twain
“Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he
is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes
courage... to listen to his own goodness.”
Pablo Casals
“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success
is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an
office.”
Lucille Ball
“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.”
Abraham Lincoln
On Research and Statistics
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Aldous Huxley
“These, Gentlemen, are the opinions upon which I base my facts.”
Winston Churchill
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
‘Eureka!’ (I've found it!), but ‘That's funny...’”
Isaac Asimov
“Statistics are no substitute for judgment.”
Henry Clay
“I’ve come loaded with statistics, for I’ve noticed that a man can’t prove anything without
statistics.”
Mark Twain
“Statistics will prove anything, even the truth.”
Noel Moynihan
“Research is to see what everybody has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.”
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize Winner (1937)
“It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day
before breakfast.”
Konrad Lorenz, 1903 - 1989
“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”
Marston Bates, 1906 - 1974
“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew
each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit
them.”
George Bernard Shaw
“It is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate man and enrich his nature, but the urge
to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.”
Albert Einstein
“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as
finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe
how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a
dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.”
Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1966
“The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give ‘em a number or give ‘em a date, but
never give ‘em both at once.”
Jane Bryant Quinn
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see
the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up
that is familiar with it.”
Max Planck
“Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”
Mark Twain
“It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in
nonscientists being wrong.”
Isaac Asimov
“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
H. L. Mencken
“In advertising there is a saying that if you can keep your head while all those around you
are losing theirs - then you just don't understand the problem.”
Hugh Malcolm Beville, Jr.
“In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to
withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the
possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.”
Stephen Jay Gould
“A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A
hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found
effective.”
Edward Teller
On Knowledge and Expertise
“It has been well said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure that you are
right. One way to immunize ourselves against misplaced certitude is to
contemplate—even to savor—the unfathomable strangeness of everything, including
ourselves.”
George Will in Newsweek, May 23, 2005
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at
the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are
more nearly certain than others.”
Bertrand Russell
“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often
born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.”
Albert Camus
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow
field.”
Niels Bohr
“An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you
know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”
Anatole France
“To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be
lulled into security is to die.”
Oscar Wilde
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
Benjamin Franklin
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Daniel J. Boorstin
“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise
by his questions.”
Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911), Egyptian writer, winner of 1988 Nobel Prize for literature
“Everybody is ignorant, only of different subjects.”
Will Rogers
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We just take a lot of old ideas and
put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn, and they create new
and curious combinations. We keep making new patterns, but the are the same old
pieces of glass that have been in use throughout all the years.”
Mark Twain
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won't change the subject.”
Winston Churchill
“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
Groucho Marks
“No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”
Sir Isaac Newton
“If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.”
Louis Armstrong
“Intellectual rigor annoys people because it interferes with the pleasure they derive from
allowing their wishes to be the fathers of their thoughts.”
George Will in a tribute to Meg Greenfield
“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
Benjamin Disraeli
On Simplicity
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely
simple, that’s creativity.”
Charles Mingus
“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.”
Martin Fischer
“It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance,
on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins
because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the
dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the
dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the
same reasons.”
Douglas Adams
“To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, THAT is to have
been educated in the knowledge of simplicity.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) German-born U.S. painter and art teacher
“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other
alternatives.”
Abba Eban
“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.”
Henry Kissinger
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Albert Einstein
“An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head
when the picture is finished.”
John Singer Sargent
On Life
“Freedom is the very source of creativity and human development. It is not enough, as
communist systems assumed, to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. If we have
these things but lack the precious air of liberty to sustain our deeper nature, we remain only
half human.”
Dalai Lama, Washington Post editorial, 10/21/07
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Albert Einstein
“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with
correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
William James
“Without passion, man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the
shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.”
Henri Frederic Amiel
“I must use beautiful words, I never know when I might have to eat them.”
Everett McKinley Dirksen
“Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be
affected by it.”
Marion Anderson
“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it
will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”
Carl Sandburg
“No one can earn a million dollars honestly.”
William Jennings Bryan
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
Bill Cosby
“It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn't.”
Martin Van Buren
“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we
would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation in life
by re-organizing. A wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while
producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”
Petronius Arbiter, 1st Century A. D.
“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete
Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”
Robert Wilensky
“I always wanted to be somebody... but I should have been more specific.”
Lily Tomlin
“We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only great, but also a man: that a
philosopher, in a life time, spends less hours pondering the destiny of the race than he gives
over to wondering if it will rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the toughness of steaks.”
H. L. Mencken
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There's no use in being a damn fool
about it.”
W. C. Fields
“One of the advantages of being Captain is being able to ask for advice without necessarily
having to take it.”
William Shatner as James T. Kirk
“You know there is a problem with the education system when you realize that out of the 3
R's, only one begins with an R.”
Dennis Miller
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle
