TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Politics is more difficult than physics.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index N > Category: Nineteenth

Nineteenth Quotes (5 quotes)

Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century’s scientific version of the myth of natural harmony–all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide–the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Best (467)  |  Case (102)  |  Century (319)  |  Definite (114)  |  Design (203)  |  Foolish (41)  |  Good (906)  |  Guise (6)  |  Harmony (105)  |  Indeed (323)  |  Late (119)  |  Long (778)  |  Myth (58)  |  Natural (810)  |  Necessarily (137)  |  Possible (560)  |  Possibly (111)  |  Purpose (336)  |  Represent (157)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Structure (365)  |  Time (1911)  |  Various (205)  |  Version (7)  |  Vision (127)  |  Vividly (11)  |  Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (42)  |  World (1850)

I have said that mathematics is the oldest of the sciences; a glance at its more recent history will show that it has the energy of perpetual youth. The output of contributions to the advance of the science during the last century and more has been so enormous that it is difficult to say whether pride in the greatness of achievement in this subject, or despair at his inability to cope with the multiplicity of its detailed developments, should be the dominant feeling of the mathematician. Few people outside of the small circle of mathematical specialists have any idea of the vast growth of mathematical literature. The Royal Society Catalogue contains a list of nearly thirty- nine thousand papers on subjects of Pure Mathematics alone, which have appeared in seven hundred serials during the nineteenth century. This represents only a portion of the total output, the very large number of treatises, dissertations, and monographs published during the century being omitted.
In Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sheffield, Section A, Nature (1 Sep 1910), 84, 285.
Science quotes on:  |  Achievement (187)  |  Advance (298)  |  Alone (324)  |  Appear (122)  |  Being (1276)  |  Catalogue (5)  |  Century (319)  |  Circle (117)  |  Contain (68)  |  Contribution (93)  |  Cope (9)  |  Despair (40)  |  Detail (150)  |  Development (441)  |  Difficult (263)  |  Dissertation (2)  |  Dominant (26)  |  Energy (373)  |  Enormous (44)  |  Feel (371)  |  Feeling (259)  |  Glance (36)  |  Greatness (55)  |  Growth (200)  |  History (716)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Idea (881)  |  Inability (11)  |  Large (398)  |  Last (425)  |  List (10)  |  Literature (116)  |  Mathematician (407)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Modern Mathematics (50)  |  Monograph (5)  |  More (2558)  |  Multiplicity (14)  |  Nearly (137)  |  Number (710)  |  Oldest (9)  |  Omit (12)  |  Output (12)  |  Outside (141)  |  Paper (192)  |  People (1031)  |  Perpetual (59)  |  Portion (86)  |  Pride (84)  |  Publish (42)  |  Pure (299)  |  Pure Mathematics (72)  |  Recent (78)  |  Represent (157)  |  Royal (56)  |  Royal Society (17)  |  Say (989)  |  Serial (4)  |  Show (353)  |  Small (489)  |  Society (350)  |  Specialist (33)  |  Subject (543)  |  Thirty (6)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Total (95)  |  Treatise (46)  |  Vast (188)  |  Will (2350)  |  Youth (109)

The essential unity of ecclesiastical and secular institutions was lost during the 19th century, to the point of senseless hostility. Yet there was never any doubt as to the striving for culture. No one doubted the sacredness of the goal. It was the approach that was disputed.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  19th Century (41)  |  Approach (112)  |  Century (319)  |  Culture (157)  |  Dispute (36)  |  Doubt (314)  |  Ecclesiastical (3)  |  Essential (210)  |  Goal (155)  |  Hostility (16)  |  Institution (73)  |  Lose (165)  |  Never (1089)  |  Point (584)  |  Secular (11)  |  Senseless (4)  |  Strive (53)  |  Unity (81)

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.
In Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), 40.
Science quotes on:  |  20th Century (40)  |  Advocate (20)  |  Atrocity (6)  |  Century (319)  |  Commit (43)  |  Foreshadow (5)  |  Hardly (19)  |  Adolf Hitler (20)  |  Man (2252)  |  Noble (93)  |  Plant (320)  |  Ripen (4)  |  Stalin_Joseph (5)  |  Word (650)

The nineteenth century was naïve because it did not know the end of the story. It did not know what happens when dedicated idealists come to power; it did not know the intimate linkage between idealists and policemen, between being your brother’s keeper and being his jailkeeper.
In Before the Sabbath (1979), 120.
Science quotes on:  |  Being (1276)  |  Brother (47)  |  Century (319)  |  Dedicate (12)  |  Dedicated (19)  |  End (603)  |  Happen (282)  |  Idealist (5)  |  Intimate (21)  |  Iuml (3)  |  Keeper (4)  |  Know (1538)  |  Linkage (5)  |  Na (3)  |  Policeman (2)  |  Power (771)  |  Story (122)


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)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 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
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.