TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index U > Category: Unconventional

Unconventional Quotes (4 quotes)

[Richard P.] Feynman's cryptic remark, “no one is that much smarter ...,” to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything “magical” but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.
In book review of James Gleick's Genius, 'Complexities of Feynman', Science, 259 (22 Jan 1993), 22
Science quotes on:  |  Achievement (187)  |  Answer (389)  |  Asking (74)  |  Assumption (96)  |  Attitude (84)  |  Convention (16)  |  Conventional (31)  |  Cryptic (2)  |  Deception (9)  |  Discard (32)  |  Ear (69)  |  Emphasis (18)  |  Richard P. Feynman (125)  |  Focus (36)  |  Implication (25)  |  Magic (92)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Question (649)  |  Reality (274)  |  Remark (28)  |  Right (473)  |  Self (268)  |  Self-Deception (2)  |  Sensitivity (10)  |  Something (718)  |  Try (296)  |  Unproven (5)  |  Willingness (10)

It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity ... Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument ... The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions–for these are our issues, not nature’s.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Argument (145)  |  Biologist (70)  |  Both (496)  |  Cause (561)  |  Challenge (91)  |  Conventional (31)  |  Do (1905)  |  Ecology (81)  |  Ethical (34)  |  Evolutionary (23)  |  Extinction (80)  |  Float (31)  |  Hard (246)  |  Human (1512)  |  Humanistic (3)  |  Inverse (7)  |  Issue (46)  |  Let (64)  |  Measure (241)  |  Moral (203)  |  More (2558)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Need (320)  |  People (1031)  |  Plea (2)  |  Practical (225)  |  Primacy (3)  |  Question (649)  |  Reason (766)  |  Snail (11)  |  Stupidity (40)  |  Touch (146)  |  Unfair (9)  |  Will (2350)  |  Write (250)

Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconventional work and contains within itself an elevated potential for inspired error. As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote: ‘Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.’ Not to mention a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who, when not in the throes of grief or the wars of parson hunting, argued that ‘irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.’
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Argue (25)  |  Burst (41)  |  Contain (68)  |  Correction (42)  |  Do (1905)  |  Economist (20)  |  Elevate (15)  |  Error (339)  |  Fruitful (61)  |  Full (68)  |  Give (208)  |  Great (1610)  |  Grief (20)  |  Harmful (13)  |  Hold (96)  |  Hunt (32)  |  Hunting (23)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Inspire (58)  |  Italian (13)  |  Keep (104)  |  Know (1538)  |  Man (2252)  |  Mention (84)  |  More (2558)  |  Name (359)  |  Orthodoxy (11)  |   Vilfredo Pareto, (5)  |  Parson (3)  |  Potential (75)  |  Reason (766)  |  Religion (369)  |  Seed (97)  |  Shake (43)  |  Sterile (24)  |  Stubborn (14)  |  Time (1911)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Vigorous (21)  |  War (233)  |  Work (1402)  |  Write (250)

The animals of the Burgess Shale are holy objects–in the unconventional sense that this word conveys in some cultures. We do not place them on pedestals and worship from afar. We climb mountains and dynamite hillsides to find them. We quarry them, split them, carve them, draw them, and dissect them, struggling to wrest their secrets. We vilify and curse them for their damnable intransigence. They are grubby little creatures of a sea floor 530 million years old, but we greet them with awe because they are the Old Ones, and they are trying to tell us something.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Afar (7)  |  Animal (651)  |  Awe (43)  |  Carve (5)  |  Climb (39)  |  Convey (17)  |  Creature (242)  |  Culture (157)  |  Curse (20)  |  Dissection (35)  |  Do (1905)  |  Draw (140)  |  Dynamite (8)  |  Find (1014)  |  Floor (21)  |  Greet (7)  |  Hillside (4)  |  Holy (35)  |  Intransigence (2)  |  Little (717)  |  Million (124)  |  Mountain (202)  |  Object (438)  |  Old (499)  |  Pedestal (3)  |  Place (192)  |  Quarry (14)  |  Sea (326)  |  Secret (216)  |  Sense (785)  |  Something (718)  |  Split (15)  |  Struggle (111)  |  Tell (344)  |  Try (296)  |  Trying (144)  |  Vilify (2)  |  Word (650)  |  Worship (32)  |  Wrest (3)  |  Year (963)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail 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) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.