Uncontrollable Quotes (5 quotes)
I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work.
As quoted in 'Tesla Says Edison Was an Empiricist', The New York Times (19 Oct 1931), 25.
Most persons seem not to want to face complexity and not to want to admit that much of nature is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as “chaos” in the short term.
From Paper by Charles A. Fink, 'Opportunities for Broadening Brain Functioning While Modeling Cyberbetic Dynamics', collected in International Association for Cybernetics, Gautier-Villars (ed.), Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Cybernetics, Namur, Belgium, Aug 1989, 485. [This is widely seen on the web—attributed to Benoit Mandelbrot—with a spurious ellipsis thus: “The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set … is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as “chaos.” Paragraphs earlier on the page, is the unrelated line, “This videoclip shows what has been called the most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set.” It is clearly a non-sequitur to link the two excerpted phrases with an ellipsis, when considered with more context of each phrase. The two phrases are now separate quotes on this website, and not attributed as a direct quote by Mandelbrot. —Webmaster (1 Nov 2021)]
The injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called “acrolein.” It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes.
[From the Laboratory of Thomas A. Edison, Orange, N.J., April 26, 1914.]
[From the Laboratory of Thomas A. Edison, Orange, N.J., April 26, 1914.]
Quoted in Henry Ford, The Case Against the Little White Slaver (1914), Vol. 1, 5.
The ruthless destruction of their forests by the Chinese is one of the reasons why famine and plague today hold this nation in their sinister grasp. Denudation, wherever practiced, leaves naked soil; floods and erosion follow, and when the soil is gone men must also go—and the process does not take long. The great plains of Eastern China were centuries ago transformed from forest into agricultural land. The mountain plateau of Central China have also within a few hundred years been utterly devastated of tree growth, and no attempt made at either natural or artificial reforestation. As a result, the water rushes off the naked slopes in veritable floods, gullying away the mountain sides, causing rivers to run muddy with yellow soil, and carrying enormous masses of fertile earth to the sea. Water courses have also changed; rivers become uncontrollable, and the water level of the country is lowered perceptibly. In consequence, the unfortunate people see their crops wither and die for lack of water when it is most needed.
Statement (11 May 1921) by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) concerning the famine in China in seven out of every ten years. Reported in 'Blames Deforestation: Department of Agriculture Ascribes Chinese Famine to it', New York Times (12 May 1921), 12.
We astronauts, we don’t really refer to it as blasting off because that sounds pretty uncontrollable. During the launch we call it launching.
Replying to a Whetstone High School students’ question during a school forum held using a downlink with the Discovery Space Shuttle mission (31 Oct 1998). On NASA web page 'STS-95 Educational Downlink'. Mubarak Abdurraqib, David Tynan, Keith Smith asked, “Commander Brown, when blasting off, do you actually feel the inertia?”
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) -- 
