…as passionlessly as a Euclidean theorem.

“You once said the aim of science was to save the world. You can’t do that if you don’t know what to save it from.” … “We agree that the world needs saving…” “We also agree that the world could save itself by letting scientists save it if they would save it.” “Maybe the world doesn’t want to save itself. It often behaves as if it didn’t. Anyhow, until it makes up its mind, science has enough to do to follow its own natural aim—which is to discover truth simply because it is truth.”

At the elementary school, for instance, I spent an hour a week on “botany,” which was an excuse for wandering through Epping Forest in charge of a master who, in his turn, regarded the hour as an excuse for a pleasant smoke in the open air. The result is that Botany to me to-day stands for just a few words like “calyx,” “stamen,” and “capillary attraction,” plus the memory of lovely hours amidst trees and bracken. I do not complain.

He was doomed, like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero.

I believe in the wisdom of often saying “probably” and “perhaps.”

I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.

I often think that the Romans were fortunate; their civilization reached as far as hot baths without touching the fatal knowledge of machinery.

I suppose the truth is that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.

Seventeen years—quite a large slice out of a life, when you come to think about it. And yet the ways I have earned my living since—by writing newspaper articles, novels, and film scenarios—were not taught me at any of these schools and colleges. Furthermore, though I won scholarships and passed examinations, I do not think I now remember more than twenty per cent of all I learned during these seventeen years, and I do not think I could now scrape through any of the examinations I passed after the age of twelve.

To make up for all I have forgotten, there is this that I have acquired, and I call it sophistication since it is not quite the same thing as learning. It is the flexible armour of doubt in an age when too many people are certain.

True that Huxley was attacked for teaching that men and monkeys were somewhat the same; but he was never exiled for refusing to teach that Jews and Gentiles were altogether different.

You cannot … judge the importance of things … by the noise they make.