Rotten Quotes (3 quotes)
If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
As soon as you are dead and rotten
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
Collected in Poor Richard's Almanack (1914), 32, No. 285.
This study was supported by NSF MBS75-14268 and inspired by paying 95 cents for a rotten avocado.
In 'Why Fruits Rot, Seeds Mold, and Meat Spoils', The American Naturalist (Jul-Aug 1977), 111, No. 980, 707. The author suggests that food spoilage is the result of microbes competing to keep the resource to themselves by engendering the rotting process to repel larger animals from consuming the food item.
What is the use of this history, what the use of all this minute research? I well know that it will not produce a fall in the price of pepper, a rise in that of crates of rotten cabbages, or other serious events of this kind, which cause fleets to be manned and set people face to face intent upon one another's extermination. The insect does not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the inexhaustible variety of its manifestations; it helps us to decipher in some small measure the obscurest book of all, the book of ourselves.
Introducing the natural history and his study of the insect Minotaurus typhoeus. In Jean-Henri Fabre and Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (trans.), The Life and Love of the Insect (1918), 128.
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) -- 
