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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index P > John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley Quotes

John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley
(13 Sep 1894 - 14 Aug 1984)

English novelist and playwright.

Science Quotes by John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley (4 quotes)

It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano.
[About his first typewriter.]
— John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley
English Journey (1934), 122-123.
Science quotes on:  |  Activity (218)  |  Child (333)  |  Different (595)  |  Figure (162)  |  First (1302)  |  Keyboard (3)  |  Long (778)  |  Machine (271)  |  More (2558)  |  Noise (40)  |  Old (499)  |  Paper (192)  |  Piano (12)  |  Set (400)  |  Solid (119)  |  Structure (365)  |  Thought (995)  |  Travel (125)  |  Travelling (17)  |  Typewriter (6)  |  Vast (188)  |  Wander (44)  |  Way (1214)  |  Wood (97)

On the 1st of August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from mercurius calcinates per se [mercury oxide]; and I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled from it very readily. … I admitted water to it [the extracted air], and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame… I was utterly at a loss how to account for it.
— John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley
From Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1775) Vol. 2, 34.
Science quotes on:  |  Account (195)  |  Air (366)  |  Burn (99)  |  Burned (2)  |  Candle (32)  |  Endeavour (63)  |  Express (192)  |  Extract (40)  |  Flame (44)  |  Imbibed (3)  |  Lens (15)  |  Loss (117)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Mercury (54)  |  More (2558)  |  Readily (10)  |  Remarkably (3)  |  Utterly (15)  |  Vigorous (21)  |  Water (503)

The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.
— John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley
Column in the London News Chronicle as quoted in article, 'Notions in Motion,' Time (24 Nov 1952).
Science quotes on:  |  Civilization (220)  |  Courage (82)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Energy (373)  |  Fit (139)  |  Know (1538)  |  Little (717)  |  Meteor (19)  |  Other (2233)  |  Patience (58)  |  Planet (402)  |  Please (68)  |  Present (630)  |  Skill (116)  |  Space Travel (23)  |  State (505)  |  Time (1911)  |  Use (771)  |  World (1850)

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
— John Boynton (J. B.) Priestley
English Journey (1934), 123.
Science quotes on:  |  Battle (36)  |  Better (493)  |  Despair (40)  |  Development (441)  |  Fear (212)  |  Gamble (3)  |  Genuine (54)  |  Giant (73)  |  Great (1610)  |  History (716)  |  Hope (321)  |  Loneliness (6)  |  Lonely (24)  |  Manufacture (30)  |  Manufacturing (29)  |  Merely (315)  |  Novel (35)  |  Pioneer (37)  |  Raid (5)  |  Romance (18)  |  Triumph (76)  |  Typewriter (6)


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)
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- 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
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- 60 -
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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


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