TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Smallest

Smallest Quotes (9 quotes)

[In plotting earthquake measurements] the range between the largest and smallest magnitudes seemed unmanageably large. Dr. Beno Gutenberg then made the natural suggestion to plot the amplitudes logarithmically.
From interview with Henry Spall, as in an abridged version of Earthquake Information Bulletin (Jan-Feb 1980), 12, No. 1, that is on the USGS website.
Science quotes on:  |  Amplitude (4)  |  Earthquake (37)  |  Beno Gutenberg (2)  |  Large (398)  |  Largest (39)  |  Magnitude (88)  |  Measurement (178)  |  Natural (810)  |  Plot (11)  |  Plotting (2)  |  Range (104)  |  Suggestion (49)

Etiam capillus unus habet umbram suam.
The smallest hair casts a shadow.
In 'Ornamenta Rationalia, or, Elegant Sentences' (1625). As given in Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political: A New Edition, With the Latin Quotations Translated (1813), No. 10, 362.
Science quotes on:  |  Cast (69)  |  Hair (25)  |  Shadow (73)

Can any thoughtful person admit for a moment that, in a society so constituted that these overwhelming contrasts of luxury and privation are looked upon as necessities, and are treated by the Legislature as matters with which it has practically nothing do, there is the smallest probability that we can deal successfully with such tremendous social problems as those which involve the marriage tie and the family relation as a means of promoting the physical and moral advancement of the race? What a mockery to still further whiten the sepulchre of society, in which is hidden ‘all manner of corruption,’ with schemes for the moral and physical advancement of the race!
In 'Human Selection', Fortnightly Review (1890),48, 330.
Science quotes on:  |  Admit (49)  |  Advancement (63)  |  Constituted (5)  |  Contrast (45)  |  Corruption (17)  |  Deal (192)  |  Do (1905)  |  Family (101)  |  Further (6)  |  Hidden (43)  |  Involve (93)  |  Legislature (4)  |  Look (584)  |  Luxury (21)  |  Manner (62)  |  Marriage (39)  |  Matter (821)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Mockery (2)  |  Moment (260)  |  Moral (203)  |  Necessity (197)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Overwhelming (30)  |  Person (366)  |  Physical (518)  |  Practically (10)  |  Privation (5)  |  Probability (135)  |  Problem (731)  |  Promoting (7)  |  Race (278)  |  Relation (166)  |  Scheme (62)  |  Sepulchre (4)  |  Social (261)  |  Society (350)  |  Still (614)  |  Successful (134)  |  Thoughtful (16)  |  Tie (42)  |  Treated (2)  |  Tremendous (29)

First, it must be a pleasure to study the human body the most miraculous masterpiece of nature and to learn about the smallest vessel and the smallest fiber. But second and most important, the medical profession gives the opportunity to alleviate the troubles of the body, to ease the pain, to console a person who is in distress, and to lighten the hour of death of many a sufferer.
Reasons for his choice of medicine as a career, from essay written during his last year in the Gymnasium (high school). As quoted in Leslie Dunn, Rudolf Virchow: Now You Know His Name (2012), 8-9.
Science quotes on:  |  Alleviate (4)  |  Body (557)  |  Career (86)  |  Console (3)  |  Death (406)  |  Distress (9)  |  Ease (40)  |  Fiber (16)  |  First (1302)  |  Hour (192)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Body (34)  |  Importance (299)  |  Learn (672)  |  Lighten (2)  |  Masterpiece (9)  |  Medical (31)  |  Miraculous (11)  |  Most (1728)  |  Must (1525)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Opportunity (95)  |  Pain (144)  |  Person (366)  |  Pleasure (191)  |  Profession (108)  |  Study (701)  |  Sufferer (7)  |  Trouble (117)  |  Vessel (63)

I am afraid I am not in the flight for “aerial navigation”. I was greatly interested in your work with kites; but I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of. So you will understand that I would not care to be a member of the aëronautical Society.
Letter (8 Dec 1896) to Baden Powell. This is the full text of the letter. An image of the handwritten original is on the zapatopi.net website
Science quotes on:  |  Aerial (11)  |  Balloon (16)  |  Care (203)  |  Expectation (67)  |  Faith (209)  |  Flight (101)  |  Good (906)  |  Hear (144)  |  Interest (416)  |  Kite (4)  |  Member (42)  |  Molecule (185)  |  Navigation (26)  |  Other (2233)  |  Result (700)  |  Society (350)  |  Trial (59)  |  Understand (648)  |  Will (2350)  |  Work (1402)

I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning.
From letter (8 Dec 1896) to Baden Powell. The full text of the letter, which begins “I am afraid I am not in the flight for “aerial navigation.”…, is on the Lord Kelvin Quotes page of this website.
Science quotes on:  |  Aerial (11)  |  Balloon (16)  |  Faith (209)  |  Flight (101)  |  Molecule (185)  |  Navigation (26)  |  Other (2233)

If we take a survey of our own world … our portion in the immense system of creation, we find every part of it, the earth, the waters, and the air that surround it, filled, and as it were crouded with life, down from the largest animals that we know of to the smallest insects the naked eye can behold, and from thence to others still smaller, and totally invisible without the assistance of the microscope. Every tree, every plant, every leaf, serves not only as an habitation, but as a world to some numerous race, till animal existence becomes so exceedingly refined, that the effluvia of a blade of grass would be food for thousands.
In The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (27 Jan O.S. 1794), 60. The word “crouded” is as it appears in the original.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Animal (651)  |  Assistance (23)  |  Become (821)  |  Behold (19)  |  Blade (11)  |  Creation (350)  |  Down (455)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Effluvium (2)  |  Exceedingly (28)  |  Existence (481)  |  Eye (440)  |  Filled (3)  |  Find (1014)  |  Food (213)  |  Grass (49)  |  Habitation (7)  |  Immense (89)  |  Insect (89)  |  Invisible (66)  |  Know (1538)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Largest (39)  |  Leaf (73)  |  Life (1870)  |  Microscope (85)  |  Naked Eye (12)  |  Numerous (70)  |  Other (2233)  |  Part (235)  |  Plant (320)  |  Portion (86)  |  Race (278)  |  Refined (8)  |  Smaller (4)  |  Still (614)  |  Surround (33)  |  Survey (36)  |  System (545)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Totally (6)  |  Tree (269)  |  Water (503)  |  World (1850)

In defining an element let us not take an external boundary, Let us say, e.g., the smallest ponderable quantity of yttrium is an assemblage of ultimate atoms almost infinitely more like each other than they are to the atoms of any other approximating element. It does not necessarily follow that the atoms shall all be absolutely alike among themselves. The atomic weight which we ascribe to yttrium, therefore, merely represents a mean value around which the actual weights of the individual atoms of the “element” range within certain limits. But if my conjecture is tenable, could we separate atom from atom, we should find them varying within narrow limits on each side of the mean.
Address to Annual General Meeting of the Chemical Society (28 Mar 1888), printed in Journal of the Chemical Society (1888), 491.
Science quotes on:  |  Absolutely (41)  |  Actual (118)  |  Alike (60)  |  Approximation (32)  |  Ascribe (18)  |  Assemblage (17)  |  Atom (381)  |  Boundary (55)  |  Certain (557)  |  Conjecture (51)  |  Definition (238)  |  Element (322)  |  External (62)  |  Find (1014)  |  Follow (389)  |  Individual (420)  |  Infinitely (13)  |  Limit (294)  |  Mean (810)  |  Merely (315)  |  More (2558)  |  Narrow (85)  |  Necessarily (137)  |  Other (2233)  |  Ponderable (4)  |  Quantity (136)  |  Range (104)  |  Represent (157)  |  Say (989)  |  Separate (151)  |  Side (236)  |  Tenable (4)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Ultimate (152)  |  Value (393)  |  Variation (93)  |  Weight (140)  |  Yttrium (3)

It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.
Quoted as “It is reported that once in a lecture after explaining a new solution of an old problem he said…”, in Alexander Macfarlane, 'Henry John Stephen Smith', Lectures on Ten British Mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (1916), 100.
Science quotes on:  |  Beauty (313)  |  Circumstance (139)  |  Method (531)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Peculiar (115)  |  Possible (560)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientific Mind (13)  |  Utility (52)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.