Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
- "I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
- "It is the glory of geometry that from so few principles, ... it is able to accomplish so much."
- "If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
- In a 1941 letter to a pacifist, "If all young people in America were to act as you intend to act, the country would be defenseless and easily delivered into slavery."
- "Beneath the effort directed towards the accumulation of worldly goods lies all too frequently the illusion that this is the most substantial and desirable end to be achieved; but there is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual's own feeling, thinking and acting. The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, none the less the fruits of their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors."
T. H. White (1906-1954)
- "The best thing for being sad, replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."
G. H. Hardy (1877-1947)
- "Reductio ad absurdum ... is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."
George F. Will
- "...Although tolerance is often a virtue, it is never sufficient as a nation's animating principle. If a nation is limitlessly inclusive, then citizenship is meaningless."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
- "The value of Euclid's work as a masterpiece of logic has been very grossly exaggerated."
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
- "All my efforts to discover a contradiction, an inconsistency, in this non-Euclidian geometry have been without success."
Other
- "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."