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Who said: “Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index F > Category: Folk

Folk Quotes (10 quotes)

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.
In 'December: Pines above the Snow', A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949, 1987), 81.
Science quotes on:  |  Act (278)  |  Circumvent (2)  |  Creation (350)  |  Curious (95)  |  God (776)  |  Humble (54)  |  Know (1538)  |  Loophole (2)  |  Pine (12)  |  Plant (320)  |  Poet (97)  |  Reserve (26)  |  Restriction (14)  |  Shovel (3)  |  Tree (269)

Educated folk keep to one another's company too much, leaving other people much like milk skimmed of its cream.
From chapter 'Jottings from a Note-Book', in Canadian Stories (1918), 176.
Science quotes on:  |  Company (63)  |  Cream (6)  |  Education (423)  |  Milk (23)  |  Other (2233)  |  People (1031)

Education is a good thing generally, but most folks educate their prejudices.
Collected in Everybody’s Friend, or Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (1874), 592. Quote restated in standard English above, from the original, “Edukashun iz a good thing generally, but most pholks eddukate their prejudices.”
Science quotes on:  |  Education (423)  |  Good (906)  |  Prejudice (96)

It is unsafe to talk mathematics. Folks don’t understand.
Martin H. Fischer, Howard Fabing (ed.) and Ray Marr (ed.), Fischerisms (1944), 3.
Science quotes on:  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Talk (108)  |  Understand (648)  |  Understanding (527)  |  Unsafe (5)

It’s an advantage up here for older folks because in Zero-g you can move around much more easily.
Replying to a Delta Middle School students’ question during a school forum held using a downlink with the Discovery Space Shuttle mission 31 Oct 1998. On NASA web page 'STS-95 Educational Downlink'. Jeff Butz, Matt Lewis, Dawn VanDyke and Jessica Burger asked “Senator Glenn, do you feel younger when you are in space?”
Science quotes on:  |  Advantage (144)  |  Easily (36)  |  More (2558)  |  Move (223)  |  Older (7)  |  Zero (38)  |  Zero Gravity (2)

Mssr. Fermat—what have you done?
Your simple conjecture has everyone
Churning out proofs,
Which are nothing but goofs!
Could it be that your statement’s an erudite spoof?
A marginal hoax
That you’ve played on us folks?
But then you’re really not known for your practical jokes.
Or is it then true
That you knew what to do
When n was an integer greater than two?
Oh then why can’t we find
That same proof…are we blind?
You must be reproved, for I’m losing my mind.
In 'Fermat's Last Theorem', Mathematics Magazine (Apr 1986), 59, No. 2, 76.
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Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.
In 'The Young and the New York Times Magazine (22 Nov 1970), 120.
Science quotes on:  |  Aristocrat (3)  |  Common (447)  |  Find (1014)  |  Intellectual (258)  |  Loathe (4)  |  Scratch (14)  |  Sight (135)  |  Smell (29)  |  Sound (187)  |  Would-Be (2)

Some young folks have wind-fall minds, prematurely detached from the tree of knowledge for a life-long sourness and pettiness.
From chapter 'Jottings from a Note-Book', in Canadian Stories (1918), 181.
Science quotes on:  |  Fall (243)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Life (1870)  |  Lifelong (10)  |  Long (778)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Pettiness (3)  |  Premature (22)  |  Tree (269)  |  Tree Of Knowledge (8)  |  Wind (141)  |  Windfall (2)  |  Young (253)

The intellectual craves a social order in which uncommon people perform uncommon tasks every day. He wants a society throbbing with dedication, reverence, and worshiHe sees it as scandalous that the discoveries of science and the feats of heroes should have as their denouement the comfort and affluence of common folk. A social order run by and for the people is to him a mindless organism motivated by sheer physiologism.
In 'Concerning Individual Freedom', The Ordeal of Change (1963, 1990), 100.
Science quotes on:  |  Affluence (3)  |  Comfort (64)  |  Common (447)  |  Crave (10)  |  Dedication (12)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Feat (11)  |  Hero (45)  |  Intellectual (258)  |  Mindless (4)  |  Motivate (8)  |  Motivated (14)  |  Order (638)  |  Organism (231)  |  People (1031)  |  Perform (123)  |  Reverence (29)  |  Run (158)  |  Scandalous (3)  |  See (1094)  |  Sheer (9)  |  Social (261)  |  Social Order (8)  |  Society (350)  |  Task (152)  |  Throb (6)  |  Uncommon (14)  |  Want (504)

We had various kinds of tape-recorded concerts and popular music. But by the end of the flight what we listened to most was Russian folk songs. We also had recordings of nature sounds: thunder, rain, the singing of birds. We switched them on most frequently of all, and we never grew tired of them. It was as if they returned us to Earth.
…...
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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
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
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