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: “Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index V > Category: Vagrant

Vagrant Quotes (5 quotes)

If this is what the McCarran Act means in practice, it seems to us a form of organized cultural suicide.
In a letter co-signed with his Princeton University physics professor colleagues, Walker Bleakney and Milton G. White, protesting that Nobel Prize-winning, Cambridge professor, Dirac having been invited for a year's visit to Princeton, had been denied a visa by the U.S. State Department under section 212A of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (McCarran Act). Quoting a report in Physics Today, this regulation includes 'categories of undesireables ranging from vagrants to stowaways.' The real reason remains unclear, but was perhaps related to Dirac's prior science-related visits to Russia. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance had recently been revoked, and this was the era of McCarthy's rabid anti-Communism hearings.
'Letters to the Times: Denial of Visa to Physicist Seen as Loss to American Science'. New York Times (3 Jun 1954), 26. In A. Pais, 'Playing With Equations, the Dirac Way'. Behram N. Kursunoglu (Ed.) and Eugene Paul Wigner (Ed.), Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac: Reminiscences about a Great Physicist (1990), 108.
Science quotes on:  |  Act (278)  |  Colleague (51)  |  Communism (11)  |  Department (93)  |  Paul A. M. Dirac (45)  |  Era (51)  |  Form (976)  |  Hearing (50)  |  Include (93)  |  Letter (117)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Nobel Prize (42)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physics (564)  |  Practice (212)  |  Professor (133)  |  Reason (766)  |  Regulation (25)  |  Remain (355)  |  Security (51)  |  State (505)  |  Suicide (23)  |  Today (321)  |  University (130)  |  White (132)  |  Winning (19)  |  Year (963)

The mind is a vagrant thing ... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
Answering criticism that the book for which he won a Pulitzer Prize was written in the years he had been employed at the Smithsonian. He specified that did not write on the premises there, but only at home outside of working hours.
Quoted by Barbara Gamarekian in 'Working Profile: Daniel J. Boorstin. Helping the Library of Congress Fulfill Its Mission', New York Times (8 Jul 1983), B6.
Science quotes on:  |  Book (413)  |  Company (63)  |  Criticism (85)  |  Employ (115)  |  Home (184)  |  Hour (192)  |  Invention (400)  |  Laboratory (214)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Outside (141)  |  Person (366)  |  Premise (40)  |  Something (718)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thinking (425)  |  Time (1911)  |  Workplace (2)  |  Write (250)  |  Year (963)

The personal adventures of a geologist would form an amusing narrative. He is trudging along, dusty and weather­beaten, with his wallet at his back, and his hammer on his shoulder, and he is taken for a stone-mason travelling in search of work. In mining-countries, he is supposed to be in quest of mines, and receives many tempting offers of shares in the ‘Wheel Dream’, or the ‘Golden Venture’;—he has been watched as a smuggler; it is well if he has not been committed as a vagrant, or apprehended as a spy, for he has been refused admittance to an inn, or has been ushered into the room appropriated to ostlers and postilions. When his fame has spread among the more enlightened part of the community of a district which he has been exploring, and inquiries are made of the peasantry as to the habits and pursuits of the great philosopher who has been among them, and with whom they have become familiar, it is found that the importance attached by him to shells and stones, and such like trumpery, is looked upon as a species of derangement, but they speak with delight of his affability, sprightliness, and good-humour. They respect the strength of his arm, and the weight of his hammer, as they point to marks which he inflicted on the rocks, and they recount with wonder his pedestrian performances, and the voracious appetite with which, at the close of a long day’s work he would devour the coarsest food that was set before him.
In Practical Geology and Mineralogy: With Instructions for the Qualitative Analysis of Minerals (1841), 31-2.
Science quotes on:  |  Adventure (69)  |  Affability (2)  |  Appetite (20)  |  Arm (82)  |  Attach (57)  |  Attached (36)  |  Back (395)  |  Become (821)  |  Community (111)  |  Delight (111)  |  Derangement (2)  |  Devour (29)  |  Dream (222)  |  Enlighten (32)  |  Enlightened (25)  |  Exploration (161)  |  Fame (51)  |  Food (213)  |  Form (976)  |  Geologist (82)  |  Golden (47)  |  Good (906)  |  Great (1610)  |  Habit (174)  |  Hammer (26)  |  Humour (116)  |  Importance (299)  |  Long (778)  |  Look (584)  |  Mine (78)  |  Mining (22)  |  More (2558)  |  Offer (142)  |  Performance (51)  |  Philosopher (269)  |  Point (584)  |  Pursuit (128)  |  Quest (39)  |  Receive (117)  |  Respect (212)  |  Rock (176)  |  Search (175)  |  Set (400)  |  Share (82)  |  Shell (69)  |  Shoulder (33)  |  Speak (240)  |  Species (435)  |  Spread (86)  |  Spy (9)  |  Stone (168)  |  Strength (139)  |  Tempting (10)  |  Travelling (17)  |  Venture (19)  |  Watch (118)  |  Weather (49)  |  Weight (140)  |  Wheel (51)  |  Wonder (251)  |  Work (1402)

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem (“It's simple; it’s broke.”) to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution.
In Making Hay (2003), 33-34.
Science quotes on:  |  Aesthetic (48)  |  Aestheticism (2)  |  Blade (11)  |  Boot (5)  |  Constitute (99)  |  Cutter (2)  |  Design (203)  |  Different (595)  |  Economy (59)  |  Efficiency (46)  |  End (603)  |  Farm (28)  |  Farmer (35)  |  First (1302)  |  Good (906)  |  Greater (288)  |  Havoc (7)  |  Hum (4)  |  Intractable (3)  |  Invention (400)  |  Inventor (79)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Motive (62)  |  Move (223)  |  Problem (731)  |  Question (649)  |  Reduce (100)  |  Relentless (9)  |  Seed (97)  |  Simple (426)  |  Simplicity (175)  |  Solution (282)  |  Stalk (6)  |  Steel (23)  |  Tinkering (6)  |  Unexpected (55)

Who vagrant transitory comets sees,
Wonders because they’re rare; but a new star
Whose motion with the firmament agrees,
Is miracle; for there no new things are.
Science quotes on:  |  Agree (31)  |  Comet (65)  |  Firmament (18)  |  Miracle (85)  |  Motion (320)  |  New (1273)  |  Rare (94)  |  See (1094)  |  Star (460)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Transitory (4)  |  Wonder (251)


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.