Scott Bembenek > Scott's Quotes

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Never memorize something that you can look up.”
― Albert Einstein

“Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks. How nonphysicists would scoff if they were able to follow the odd course of developments!”
― Albert Einstein

“By the study of Boltzmann I have been unable to understand him. He could not understand me on account of my shortness, and his length was and is an equal stumbling block to me.”
― James Clerk Maxwell

“I am ceaselessly occupied with the question of the constitution of radiation … This quantum question is so incredibly important and difficult that everyone should busy himself on it.”
― Albert Einstein

“So the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Perhaps I have found out a little about the structure of atoms.”
― Niels Bohr

“A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It's supposed to be a door.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark