Damn Quotes (12 quotes)
“You damn sadist,” said Mr Cummings, “you try to make people think.”
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~~[Attributed without source]~~ A theory that you can’t explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.
Variant “…explain to a cleaning lady….” Often seen, virally spread, but always without a source citation. If you can provide a primary source, please contact Webmaster. Until then the quote should be regarded as not authenticated.
For if those who hold that there must be a physical basis for everything hold that these mystical views are nonsense, we may ask—What then is the physical basis of nonsense? ... In a world of ether and electrons we might perhaps encounter nonsense; we could not encounter damned nonsense.
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I do not claim that intelligence, however defined, has no genetic basis–I regard it as trivially true, uninteresting, and unimportant that it does. The expression of any trait represents a complex interaction of heredity and environment ... a specific claim purporting to demonstrate a mean genetic deficiency in the intelligence of American blacks rests upon no new facts whatever and can cite no valid data in its support. It is just as likely that blacks have a genetic advantage over whites. And, either way, it doesn’t matter a damn. An individual can’t be judged by his group mean.
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I never could make out what those damned dots meant.
Referring to decimal points. “But this was surely only to tease.” Quoted in W.S. Churchill, Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), Vol. 2, 184.
I’m addicted to the entire planet. I don’t want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells...
In Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), 144.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another; if a man is a scientist, like me, he’ll always say “Publish and be damned.”
Quoted by George Steiner giving the first Bronowski Memorial Lecture, 'Has Truth a Future?' (1978) in London. As cited in Robert Andrews (ed.), The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), 812.
Medicine is a noble profession but a damn bad business.
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The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster.
In The Money Game (1967), 154.
There is a curious illusion today that nature is both wise and good. The awful truth is that nature is a bitch from the human point of view I care about the whooping crane a little. I would even give $10 to save the whooping crane. The whooping crane doesn’t give a damn about me.
From paper presented at Laramie College of Commerce and Industry, University of Wyoming, 'Energy and the Environment' (Jan 1976), 12, as quoted in Kenneth Ewart Boulding and Richard P. Beilock (ed.), Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms (1980, 2009), 153.
To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be—I hope it is—redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
Lecture (11 Apr 1980), Hamburg, Germany. Collected in 'Belief and Creativity',A Moving Target (1982), 201.
We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that “we choose death.”
In Maurice F. Strong (ed.), Who Speaks For Earth (1973), 31. In Robert Andrews, The Columbia Book of Quotations (1993), 261.
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) -- 
