Platform Quotes (3 quotes)
In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself … may have had anything but a public motive… The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives… He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.
In The Conquest of Happiness (1930, 2006), 79.
One precept for the scientist-to-be is already obvious. Do not place yourself in an environment where your advisor is already suffering from scientific obsolescence. If one is so unfortunate as to receive his training under a person who is either technically or intellectually obsolescent, one finds himself to be a loser before he starts. It is difficult to move into a position of leadership if one’s launching platform is a scientific generation whose time is already past.
In 'Scientific innovation and creativity: a zoologist’s point of view', American Zoologist (1982), 22, 229.
We reached the village of Watervliet, [New York] … and here we crossed the Hudson in a horse-tow-boat. Having never witnessed, except in America, this ingenious contrivance for crossing a river, I shall explain to you what it is … On each side of the boat, and standing on a revolving platform constructed a foot below the surface of the deck, is placed a horse, harnessed and attached to a splinter-bar which is fastened to the boat, so as to keep him in his proper position. When every thing is ready for departure, the animal is made to walk, and by the action of his feet puts the platform in motion, which, communicating with the paddle-wheels, gives them their rotatory evolution; and by this means the boat is propelled in any direction in which the helmsman wishes to go.
In Letter VIII, to a friend in England, from Lockport, New York (25 Jul 1831), collected in Narrative of a Tour in North America (1834), Vol. 1, 184-184.
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) -- 
