"to achieve the marvellous it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought"

"Whether or not it is true that the age of adventure in the physical world is now closed, adventure in the world of thought is still open to every soul that is not wholly tamed and in love with the cage. It has always been more difficult than in the ordinary sense, and it is more difficult every day. Uniformity of thought is increasingly the apparent goal and demand of civilization; education has no use for the fires of rebellion, and even science itself is not above lending an occasional hand to the fire engine. Still, there burns on in most of us a small wild spark. I advise you to cherish it as a precious possession. Do not, however, be under any misapprehension. Really to think for oneself is as strange, difficult and dangerous as any adventure, and, as the wise ones say, ?it will do you no good?; but, like virtue---which it does not otherwise greatly resemble---it will be its own reward."
      -- William Trotter
 
 

"The University is an academic community dedicated to teaching, learning and research."
      -- from UMD Academic Dishonesty Policy

"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house."
      -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
 

If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
       ----   Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

A man who can read and write is 9/10ths free even in chains
---Robert Heinlein in Expended Universe.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion- in the long run these are the only people who count...
---Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love.

"No experiment should be believed unless it has been confirmed by theory"
       -- Eddington (in a lighter vein)

"There was a time when religion ruled the world, it is known as the dark ages."
       -- Ruth Green

"Nature is my religion, and it's enough for me."
      -- Prof. George Wald, Harvard

"Organized religion is a sham."
      -- Jesse Ventura

"The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever."
      -- K. E. Tsiolkovsky

"We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortituous, slow, biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation."
      -- Carl Sagan in "The Cosmic Connection"

"In our earlier history, so far as we can tell, individuals held an allegiance toward their immediate tribal group, which may have numbered no more than ten or twenty individuals, all of whom were related by consanguinity. As time went on, ... . Today, a particular instant in the 4.5 billion-year-history of earth and in the several-million-year history of mankind, most human-beings owe their primary allegiance to nation-states."
      -- Carl Sagan in "The Cosmic Connection"

"Human history is filled with monstrous cases of small differences-- in skin pigmentation, or abtruse theological speculation, or manner of dress and hair style-- being the cause of harrasment, enslavement and murder. A being quite like us, but with a small physiological difference-- a third eye, say, or blue hair covering the nose and forehead-- somehow evokes feelings of revulsion. Such feelings may have had adaptive value at one time in defending our small tribe against the beasts and neighbours. But in our times, such feelings are obsolete and dangerous. "
      -- Carl sagan in "The Cosmic Connection"

"There is a place with four suns in the sky-- red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and start-stuff flows between them.
  I know of a world with million moons.
  I know of a sun the size of the Earth-- and made of diamond.
  There are atomic nuclei a mile across that rotate thirty times a second.
  There are tiny grains between the stars, and with the size and atomic composition of bacteria.
  There are stars leaving the Milky Way. There are immense gas clouds falling into the Milky Way.
  There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions.
  There are, perhaps, places outside our universe.
  The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it."
      -- Carl sagan in "The Cosmic Connection"

"...On the rare ocaasions when conversations over lunch or tea touch on matters of religion, the strongest reaction expressed by most of my fellow physicists is a mild surprise and amusement that anyone still takes all that seriously. Many physicists maintain a nominal affiliation with the faith of their parents, as a form of ethnic identification and for use at weddings and funerals, but few of these physicists seem to pay any attention to their nominal religion's theology. _... as far as I can tell from my own observations, most physicists today are not sufficiently interested in religion even to qualify as practising atheists."
      -- Steven Weinberg in "Dreams of a Final Theory" p. 256

"Wolfgang Pauli was once asked whether he thought that a particularly ill-conceived phyiscs paper was wrong. He replied that such a description would be too kind---the paper was not even wrong. I happen to think that religious conservatives are wrong in what they believe, but at least they have not forgotten what it means to really believe something. the religious liberals seem to me to be not even wrong."
      -- Steven Weinberg in "Dreams of a Final Theory" p. 257-8

"In the middle of the nineteenth century, the largely self-educated British physicist Michael Faraday was visited by his monarch, Queen Victoria. Among Faraday's many celebrated discoveries, some of obvious and immediate practical benefit, were more arcane findings in electricity and magnetism, then little more than laboratory curiosities. In the traditional dialog between heads of states and heads of laboratories, the Queen asked Faradayof what use such studies were, to which he is said to have replied, 'Madam, of what use is a baby?' Faraday had an idea that there might someday be something practical in electricity and magnetism. ... astonishing consequences. The corrected Maxwell's equations implied the existence of electromagnetic radiation, encompassing gamma-rays, X0rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared and radio. They simulated Einstein to discover Special Relativity. .. technical revolution on planet Earth. Electric lights, telephones, phonographs, radio, television, refrigerated trains, cardiac pacemakers, hydroelectric power plants, automatic fire-alarms and sprinkler systems, electric trolleys and subways, and the electronic computers are a few devices in the direct evolutionary line from the arcane laboratory puttering of Faraday and the aesthetic dissatisfaction of Maxwell, staring at some mathematical squiggles on a piece of paper. Many of the most practical applications of science have been made in this serendipitous and unpredictable way. No amount of money would have sufficed in Victoria's day for the leading scientists to have simply sat down and invented, let us say, television."
      -- Carl Sagan in "Broica's Brain"

"Your mind is your most powerful resource."
      -- (math rotunda, univ of MD).

"...Where the tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the mind is witout fear and the head is held high
...
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit..."
Where the mind is led forward .. into ever-widening thought and action...
      -- Rabindra Nath Tagore in "Geetanjali"

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."
      -- Henri Poincare
 

Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a
receipt.

If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
                -- Roy Santoro

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of
nothing.

The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided
by the number of people in the group.

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.

"Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow."

 One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
        Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago.  Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use.  UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with.  It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for
interchanging programs between different machines.  And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it.  We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
        It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system andwill end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
        With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there.  With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there.  That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
                -- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
                -- Arthur C. Clarke

Dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program.
                -- Arthur C. Clarke

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The way in which our society deals with minorities is a guide to our civilization.
                  -- David Pannick.

I could not marry the man of my choice. I could not alter my now inaccurate birth certificate. If convicted of a crime, I would be sent to a male prison. I could not legally be raped.
                -- Caroline Cossey (aka Tula, a famous model) who was born a male, but continues to be denied recognition as a female by British Govt. even as her pictures drive men crazy..