Club Quotes (8 quotes)
[My research] throve best under adversity … in Germany in the middle 1930s under the Nazis when things became quite unpleasant and official seminars became dull. … We had a little private club… theoretical physicists and biologists. The discussions we had at that time have had a remarkable long-range effect, an effect that astonished us all. This was one adverse situation. Like the great Plague in Florence in 1348, which is the background setting for Bocaccio's Decameron.
A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details, and to classify these in their proper groups. Thus, in examining weapons, they are to be classed under spear, club, sling, bow and arrow, and so forth; among textile arts are to be ranged matting, netting, and several grades of making and weaving threads; myths are divided under such headings as myths of sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths, earthquake-myths, local myths which account for the names of places by some fanciful tale, eponymic myths which account for the parentage of a tribe by turning its name into the name of an imaginary ancestor; under rites and ceremonies occur such practices as the various kinds of sacrifice to the ghosts of the dead and to other spiritual beings, the turning to the east in worship, the purification of ceremonial or moral uncleanness by means of water or fire. Such are a few miscellaneous examples from a list of hundreds … To the ethnographer, the bow and arrow is the species, the habit of flattening children’s skulls is a species, the practice of reckoning numbers by tens is a species. The geographical distribution of these things, and their transmission from region to region, have to be studied as the naturalist studies the geography of his botanical and zoological species.
Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the “Mona Lisa” painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
Dear Professor Rutherford, We students of our university physics club elect you our honorary president because you proved that atoms have balls.
Science is a cosy, friendly club of specialists who follow their numerous different stars; it is proud and wonderfully productive but never certain and always hampered by the persistence of incomplete world views.
The physician being, then, truly a blind man, armed with a club, who, as chance directs the weight of his blow, will be certain of annihilating nature or the disease.
The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race, and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.
To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.