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 path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it... That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That�s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Specialty

Specialty Quotes (13 quotes)

“Any specialty, if important, is too important to be left to the specialists.” After all, the specialist cannot function unless he concentrates more or less entirely on his specialty and, in doing so, he will ignore the vast universe lying outside and miss important elements that ought to help guide his judgment. He therefore needs the help of the nonspecialist, who, while relying on the specialist for key information, can yet supply the necessary judgment based on everything else… Science, therefore, has become too important to be left to the scientists.
In 'The Fascination of Science', The Roving Mind (1983), 123. Asimov begins by extending a quote by George Clemenceau: “War is too important to be left to the generals.”
Science quotes on:  |  Become (821)  |  Concentrate (28)  |  Doing (277)  |  Element (322)  |  Everything (489)  |  Function (235)  |  Guide (107)  |  Ignore (52)  |  Important (229)  |  Information (173)  |  Judgment (140)  |  Lying (55)  |  Miss (51)  |  More (2558)  |  More Or Less (71)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Outside (141)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Specialist (33)  |  Supply (100)  |  Universe (900)  |  Vast (188)  |  Will (2350)

Dermatology is the best specialty. The patient never dies and never gets well.
Anonymous
J. Dantith and A. Isaacs, Medical Quotes: A Thematic Dictionary (1989)
Science quotes on:  |  Best (467)  |  Dermatologist (3)  |  Dermatology (2)  |  Never (1089)  |  Patient (209)

I do not think evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty. On the contrary, it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important.
This View of Life: the World of an Evolutionist (1964), 27-28.
Science quotes on:  |  Contrary (143)  |  Do (1905)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Important (229)  |  Think (1122)

I find the questions I’m most often asked have to do with the magnitude scale, or with prediction, or with the safety of tall buildings. Those are the most common. … And naturally the safety of tall buildings is not particularly my specialty—I’m no engineer.
From interview, Session 3 (22 Feb 1978) by Ann Scheid, 'Charles Richter (1900-1985)', on website for Caltech Oral Histories of The Caltech Institute Archives.
Science quotes on:  |  Buildings (5)  |  Common (447)  |  Engineer (136)  |  Prediction (89)  |  Question (649)  |  Richter Scale (4)  |  Safety (58)

It is not enough to teach man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he—with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.
From interview with Benjamin Fine, 'Einstein Stresses Critical Thinking', New York Times (5 Oct 1952), 37.
Science quotes on:  |  Acquire (46)  |  Beautiful (271)  |  Become (821)  |  Develop (278)  |  Developed (11)  |  Dog (70)  |  Enough (341)  |  Essential (210)  |  Feel (371)  |  Feeling (259)  |  Good (906)  |  Harmonious (18)  |  Kind (564)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Lively (17)  |  Machine (271)  |  Man (2252)  |  Moral (203)  |  More (2558)  |  Must (1525)  |  Otherwise (26)  |  Person (366)  |  Personality (66)  |  Resemble (65)  |  Sense (785)  |  Specialized (9)  |  Student (317)  |  Teach (299)  |  Through (846)  |  Train (118)  |  Understanding (527)  |  Useful (260)  |  Value (393)  |  Vivid (25)

Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way ... Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.
Science, The Center of Culture (1970), 92. Quoted by Victor F. Weisskopf, 'One Hundred Years of the Physical Review', in H. Henry Stroke, Physical Review: The First Hundred Years: a Selection of Seminal Papers and Commentaries, Vol. 1, 15.
Science quotes on:  |  Badly (32)  |  Beast (58)  |  Become (821)  |  Expect (203)  |  Expectation (67)  |  Goal (155)  |  Graduate (32)  |  Graduate Student (13)  |  Increase (225)  |  Indeed (323)  |  Integration (21)  |  Intellect (251)  |  Know (1538)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Little (717)  |  Meaning (244)  |  More (2558)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural Philosophy (52)  |  Need (320)  |  Number (710)  |  Other (2233)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physicist (270)  |  Physics (564)  |  Poor (139)  |  Self (268)  |  Self-Contained (3)  |  Self-Sustaining (3)  |  Student (317)  |  Tendency (110)  |  Unification (11)  |  Way (1214)

Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
Appended to his entry in Who’s Who. In Alan Lindsay Mackay, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991), 163.
Science quotes on:  |  Choice (114)  |  Competition (45)  |  Discipline (85)  |  Essential (210)  |  Everything (489)  |  Intellect (251)  |  Intellectual (258)  |  Rare (94)  |  Ruin (44)  |  Rule (307)  |  Scholar (52)  |  Settled (34)  |  Sport (23)  |  Welfare (30)

Specialists never contribute anything to their specialty; Helmholtz wasn’t an eye-specialist, but a German army doctor who invented the ophthalmoscope one Saturday afternoon when there wasn’t anything else to do. Incidentally, he rewrote whole chapters of physics, so that the physicists only know him as one of their own. Robert Mayer wasn’t a physicist, but another country doctor; and Pasteur, who made bacteriology, was a tanner’s son or a chemist, as you will.
In Fischerisms (1930), 7.
Science quotes on:  |  Afternoon (5)  |  Army (35)  |  Bacteriology (5)  |  Chapter (11)  |  Chemist (169)  |  Contribution (93)  |  Country (269)  |  Do (1905)  |  Doctor (191)  |  Eye (440)  |  German (37)  |  Hermann von Helmholtz (32)  |  Incidental (15)  |  Invented (4)  |  Know (1538)  |  Robert Mayer (9)  |  Never (1089)  |  Louis Pasteur (85)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physicist (270)  |  Physics (564)  |  Saturday (11)  |  Son (25)  |  Specialist (33)  |  Whole (756)  |  Will (2350)

That ability to impart knowledge … what does it consist of? … a deep belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a concern about it amounting to a sort of passion. A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it—this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. That is because there is enthusiasm in him, and because enthusiasm is almost as contagious as fear or the barber’s itch. An enthusiast is willing to go to any trouble to impart the glad news bubbling within him. He thinks that it is important and valuable for to know; given the slightest glow of interest in a pupil to start with, he will fan that glow to a flame. No hollow formalism cripples him and slows him down. He drags his best pupils along as fast as they can go, and he is so full of the thing that he never tires of expounding its elements to the dullest.
This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties—for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler—men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated.
In Prejudices: third series (1922), 241-2.
For a longer excerpt, see H.L. Mencken on Teaching, Enthusiasm and Pedagogy.
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (162)  |  Attainment (48)  |  Barber (5)  |  Belief (615)  |  Best (467)  |  Theodor Billroth (2)  |  Call (781)  |  Called Science (14)  |  Capacity (105)  |  Concern (239)  |  Consist (223)  |  Contagion (9)  |  Deep (241)  |  Derision (8)  |  Down (455)  |  Dream (222)  |  Eat (108)  |  Element (322)  |  Enthusiasm (59)  |  Enthusiast (9)  |  Explain (334)  |  Fan (3)  |  Fear (212)  |  Flame (44)  |  Formalism (7)  |  Glow (15)  |  William Stewart Halsted (2)  |  High (370)  |  Thomas Henry Huxley (132)  |  Impart (24)  |  Imparting (6)  |  Importance (299)  |  Interest (416)  |  Itch (11)  |   Benjamin Jowett (11)  |  Know (1538)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Little (717)  |  Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (3)  |  Man (2252)  |  Matter (821)  |  Men Of Science (147)  |  Never (1089)  |  New (1273)  |  News (36)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Observe (179)  |  Sir William Osler (48)  |  Ostwald_Carl (2)  |  Passion (121)  |  Pedagogy (2)  |  Potent (15)  |  Principle (530)  |  Pupil (62)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Sleep (81)  |  Slow (108)  |  So-Called (71)  |  Start (237)  |  Subject (543)  |  Success (327)  |  Teach (299)  |  Teaching (190)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thoroughly (67)  |  Trouble (117)  |  Value (393)  |  Rudolf Virchow (50)  |  Whatever (234)  |  Will (2350)  |  Willing (44)

The complexity of contemporary biology has led to an extreme specialization, which has inevitably been followed by a breakdown in communication between disciplines. Partly as a result of this, the members of each specialty tend to feel that their own work is fundamental and that the work of other groups, although sometimes technically ingenious, is trivial or at best only peripheral to an understanding of truly basic problems and issues. There is a familiar resolution to this problem but it is sometimes difficulty to accept emotionally. This is the idea that there are a number of levels of biological integration and that each level offers problems and insights that are unique to it; further, that each level finds its explanations of mechanism in the levels below, and its significances in the levels above it.
From 'Interaction of physiology and behavior under natural conditions', collected in R.I. Bowman (ed.), The Galapagos (1966), 39.
Science quotes on:  |  Accept (198)  |  Basic (144)  |  Below (26)  |  Best (467)  |  Biological (137)  |  Biology (232)  |  Breakdown (3)  |  Communication (101)  |  Complexity (121)  |  Contemporary (33)  |  Difficulty (201)  |  Discipline (85)  |  Emotionally (3)  |  Explanation (246)  |  Extreme (78)  |  Familiar (47)  |  Far (158)  |  Feel (371)  |  Find (1014)  |  Follow (389)  |  Fundamental (264)  |  Group (83)  |  Idea (881)  |  Inevitably (6)  |  Ingenious (55)  |  Insight (107)  |  Integration (21)  |  Issue (46)  |  Lead (391)  |  Level (69)  |  Mechanism (102)  |  Member (42)  |  Number (710)  |  Offer (142)  |  Other (2233)  |  Partly (5)  |  Peripheral (3)  |  Problem (731)  |  Resolution (24)  |  Result (700)  |  Significance (114)  |  Sometimes (46)  |  Specialization (24)  |  Technically (5)  |  Tend (124)  |  Trivial (59)  |  Truly (118)  |  Understand (648)  |  Understanding (527)  |  Unique (72)  |  Work (1402)

The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiae.
'The Old Humanities and the New Science' (1919). In G. L. Keynes (ed.), Selected Writings of Sir William Osler (1951), 27.
Science quotes on:  |  Development (441)  |  Extraordinary (83)  |  Fragment (58)  |  Hazard (21)  |  Lose (165)  |  Loss (117)  |  Maze (11)  |  Minutiae (7)  |  Modern (402)  |  Modern Science (55)  |  Necessity (197)  |  Outlook (32)  |  Proportion (140)  |  Sense (785)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Undoing (2)  |  Way (1214)  |  Worker (34)

Those who have occasion to enter into the depths of what is oddly, if generously, called the literature of a scientific subject, alone know the difficulty of emerging with an unsoured disposition. The multitudinous facts presented by each corner of Nature form in large part the scientific man's burden to-day, and restrict him more and more, willy-nilly, to a narrower and narrower specialism. But that is not the whole of his burden. Much that he is forced to read consists of records of defective experiments, confused statement of results, wearisome description of detail, and unnecessarily protracted discussion of unnecessary hypotheses. The publication of such matter is a serious injury to the man of science; it absorbs the scanty funds of his libraries, and steals away his poor hours of leisure.
'Physiology, including Experimental Pathology and Experimental Physiology', Reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1899, 891-2.
Science quotes on:  |  Absorb (54)  |  Alone (324)  |  Burden (30)  |  Call (781)  |  Consist (223)  |  Corner (59)  |  Depth (97)  |  Detail (150)  |  Difficulty (201)  |  Discussion (78)  |  Disposition (44)  |  Enter (145)  |  Experiment (736)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Form (976)  |  Fund (19)  |  Generous (17)  |  Hour (192)  |  Hypothesis (314)  |  Injury (36)  |  Know (1538)  |  Large (398)  |  Leisure (25)  |  Library (53)  |  Literature (116)  |  Man (2252)  |  Matter (821)  |  Men Of Science (147)  |  More (2558)  |  Multitudinous (4)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Occasion (87)  |  Poor (139)  |  Present (630)  |  Publication (102)  |  Read (308)  |  Record (161)  |  Result (700)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Serious (98)  |  Statement (148)  |  Subject (543)  |  Unnecessary (23)  |  Whole (756)

You cannot do without one specialty. You must have some base-line to measure the work and attainments of others. For a general view of the subject, study the history of the sciences. Broad knowledge of all Nature has been the possession of no naturalist except Humboldt, and general relations constituted his specialty.
Lecture at a teaching laboratory on Penikese Island, Buzzard's Bay. Quoted from the lecture notes by David Starr Jordan, Science Sketches (1911), 146.
Science quotes on:  |  Attainment (48)  |  Base (120)  |  Broad (28)  |  Do (1905)  |  General (521)  |  History (716)  |  History Of Science (80)  |  Baron Alexander von Humboldt (21)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Measure (241)  |  Must (1525)  |  Naturalist (79)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Other (2233)  |  Possession (68)  |  Study (701)  |  Subject (543)  |  View (496)  |  Work (1402)


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.