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Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index P > Category: Precedent

Precedent Quotes (9 quotes)

A survey of the literature published during the last ten years dealing with education and the educational problems in America,… cannot fail to impress even the most casual that antagonists and protagonists fall into three roughly classified camps: at one extreme the culturalists, at the other the vocationalists, and between and exposed to the ceaseless fire of both the bewildered parents, who are concerned with the problem primarily as it touches the education of their own children, and who, confused by the amount of ammunition expended by the opposing forces, have been compelled to draw the small solace possible from an ancient stalemate, that “Much may be said for both sides,” and have blindly trusted precedent with an historical faith in the traditional good lying somewhere in the thing called “education.” The tide of battle has ebbed and flowed, the advantage of ammunition and popular support being now with one, now with the other; and the plight of the bewildered yet vitally concerned non-combatant has remained virtually the same.
Co-author with Louis Jay Heath, in 'Preface', A New Basis for Social Progress (1917), ix
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For the average mind precedent sanctifies.
Aphorism in The Philistine (Apr 1905), 20, No. 5, 160.
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In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.
From Turing Award acceptance speech.
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It is impossible for us adequately to conceive the boldness of the measure which aimed at universal education through the establishment of free schools. ... it had no precedent in the world's history ... But time has ratified its soundness. Two centuries proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, as beneficient as it was disinterested. ... The establishment of free schools was one of those grand mental and moral experiments whose effects could not be developed and made manifest in a single generation. ... The sincerity of our gratitude must be tested by our efforts to perpetuate and improve what they established. The gratitude of the lips only is an unholy offering.
Tenth Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (1946). Life and Works of Horace Mann (1891), Vol. 4, 111-112.
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Mastering the lawless science of our law,—
That codeless myriad of precedent,
That wilderness of single instances.
'Aylmer’s Field.' The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate (1869), 341.
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Precedents are treated by powerful minds as fetters with which to bind down the weak, as reasons with which to mistify the moderately informed, and as reeds which they themselves fearlessly break through whenever new combinations and difficult emergencies demand their highest efforts.
A Word to the Wise (1833), 3-6. Quoted in Anthony Hyman (ed.), Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (1989), 202.
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Talent deals with the actual, with discovered and realized truths, any analyzing, arranging, combining, applying positive knowledge, and, in action, looking to precedents. Genius deals with the possible, creates new combinations, discovers new laws, and acts from an insight into new principles.
In 'Genius', Wellman’s Miscellany (Dec 1871), 4, No. 6, 203.
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The expenditure [on building railways] of £286,000,000 by the people has secured to us the advantages of internal communication all but perfect,—of progress in science and arts unexampled at any period of the history of the world,—of national progress almost unchecked, and of prosperity and happiness increased beyond all precedent.
From 'Railway System and its Results' (Jan 1856) read to the Institution of Civil Engineers, reprinted in Samuel Smiles, Life of George Stephenson (1857), 512.
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The maintenance of security … required every member of the project to attend strictly to his own business. The result was an operation whose efficiency was without precedent.
In And Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project (1962), 414.
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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
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Carl Gauss
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- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
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Charles Babbage
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Euclid
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- 80 -
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- 70 -
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- 60 -
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- 50 -
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- 40 -
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- 30 -
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- 20 -
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- 10 -
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