Trustee Quotes (3 quotes)
All those things [scientific research] which you would think would recommend me to the trustees my opponent is using against me. I am shamefully abused as being an atheist, an infidel. It has been positively asserted that I seek to make proselytes to infidelity, and that in my writings I have tried to prove that geology overthrows the Mosaic account of the creation. You may judge of my feelings.”
In letter (1853) to Spencer F. Baird, describing competing for the opening for chair of anatomy. As quoted, without detailed source citation, in Henry Fairfield Osborn, 'Biographical Memoir of Joseph Leidy', collected in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs: Volume 7 (1913), 346.
Each generation of humanity takes the earth as trustees… We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.
From address (22 Apr 1885), as reported in 'An Address by J. Sterling Morton on Arbor Day 1885', Nebraska City News. Also appears in J. Sterling Morton, 'Arbor Day', Proceedings of the American Forestry Congress at its Meeting Held in Boston, September 1885 (1886), 51.
When rich men are thus brought to regard themselves as trustees, and poor men learn to be industrious, economical, temperate, self-denying, and diligent in the acquisition of knowledge, then the deplorable strife between capital and labor, tending to destroy their fundamental, necessary, and irrefragable harmony will cease, and the world will no longer be afflicted with such unnatural industrial conflicts as we have seen during the past century...
Address (31 May 1871) to the 12th annual commencement at the Cooper Union, honoring his 80th birthday, in New York City Mission and Tract Society, Annual report of the New York City Mission and Tract Society (1872), 69.
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) -- 
