Hack Quotes (3 quotes)
If tombstones were still in style, I would want to have the two words [“Renaissance hack”] chiseled right under my name.
In an encounter Flanagan had with The New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael, she claimed to knew nothing about science. He gently scolded her. Kael responded with the genial retort: “Oh, you're a Renaissance hack,” a description which pleased him. Recounted in Flanagan's Version: A Spectator's Guide to Science on the Eve of the 21st Century (1988), 3.
Life is a phenomenon sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury—you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.
In An Almanac for Moderns (1935), 393.
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilisation ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism–how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
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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) -- 
