In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.
From Jean Rostand
In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.
A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.
The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.
Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.
A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.
It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.
It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.
Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
3 perspectives
1 perspectives