Stern Quotes (6 quotes)
A frequent misunderstanding of my vision of Gaia is that I champion complacence, that I claim feedback will always protect the environment from any serious harm that humans might do. It is sometimes more crudely put as “Lovelock’s Gaia gives industry the green light to pollute at will.” The truth is almost diametrically opposite. Gaia, as I see her, is no doting mother tolerant of misdemeanors, nor is she some fragile and delicate damsel in danger from brutal mankind. She is stern and tough, always keeping the world warm and comfortable for those who obey the rules, but ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress. Her unconscious goal is a planet fit for life. If humans stand in the way of this, we shall be eliminated with as little pity as would be shown by the micro-brain of an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile in full flight to its target.
In The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (1999), 199.
How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasture nothing but years of effort can extract it. You can’t hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can’t shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon. So died, for each of us, still bravely fighting, our mathematical training; except for a set of people called “mathematicians”—born so, like crooks.
In Too Much College: Or, Education Eating up Life, with Kindred Essays in Education and Humour (1939), 8.
Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.
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The stern and stony eye of science seeks answers that are not grounded in the fundamentality of purpose.
In 'Will Science Ever Fail?', New Scientist (8 Aug 1992), 135, No. 1883, 32.
The wisest man could ask no more of fate
Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,
Safe from the many, honored by the few;
Nothing to count in world, or church, or state,
But inwardly in secret to be great;
To feel mysterious nature ever new,
To touch, if not to grasp, her endless clue,
And learn by each discovery how to wait,
To widen knowledge and escape the praise;
Wisely to teach because more wise to learn;
To toil for science, not to draw men’s gate,
But for her love of self denial stern;
That such a man could spring from our decays
Fans the soul’s nobler faith until it burn.
Than to be simple, modest, manly, true,
Safe from the many, honored by the few;
Nothing to count in world, or church, or state,
But inwardly in secret to be great;
To feel mysterious nature ever new,
To touch, if not to grasp, her endless clue,
And learn by each discovery how to wait,
To widen knowledge and escape the praise;
Wisely to teach because more wise to learn;
To toil for science, not to draw men’s gate,
But for her love of self denial stern;
That such a man could spring from our decays
Fans the soul’s nobler faith until it burn.
Elegy to Dr. Leidy for introduction to the inauguration of the Joseph Leidy Memorial Lectureship. As published in 'The Joseph Leidy Lecture: Introduction by the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania', Science (30 May 1913), 37, No. 961, 809.
Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of its husk, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.
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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) -- 
