Raft Quotes (4 quotes)
Horace Mann vividly pictures the power of education in his statement about the savage and transportation. Modifying his statement, it can be said: The savage can fasten only a dozen pounds on his back and swim the river. When he is educated enough to make an axe, fell a tree, and build a raft, he can carry many times a dozen pounds. As soon as he learns to rip logs into boards and build a boat, he multiplies his power a hundredfold; and when to this he adds mathematics, chemistry, physics, and other modern sciences he can produce the monster steel leviathans that defy wind, storm, and distance, and bear to the uttermost parts of the earth burdens a millionfold greater than the uneducated savage could carry across the narrow river.
In 'The Money Value of Education', Department of the Interior Bureau of Education Bulletin (1917), No. 22, 11.
That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another. I have changed lives. My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating on a raft far, far away from any world I ever knew.
…...
The discovery of the steam-engine owed its birth, like most human inventions, to rude attempts which have been attributed to different persons, while the real author is not certainly known. … There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.
As translated in Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat and on Machines Fitted to Develop Power (1890, Rev. 1897), 41. Edited by R. H. Thurston, from the original French, Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu (1824).
We 20th century people, regardless of our field, are so biased in our thinking about what it takes to cross an ocean that we get carried away by dogma even when it contradicts known facts. I had to cross the ocean three times on a raft and undergo a number of other empirical experiments to find out how far our modern ideas are from reality.
In Miroslav Náplava, 'Legenda jménem Thor Heyerdahl', Lidé a Země (1998), No. 9, 570. ('A legend named Thor Heyerdahl', People and Earth), as expressed by Google translate.
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) -- 
