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James Thurber
(8 Dec 1894 - 2 Nov 1961)
American writer, cartoonist and playwright who wrote 40 books, including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and created many cover cartoons for New Yorker magazine.
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Science Quotes by James Thurber (5 quotes)
[My grandmother] lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her.
— James Thurber
In My Life and Hard Times (1937, 1999), 16.
Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn’t know anything about playwrights.
— James Thurber
In article 'Roaming in the Gloaming' collected in Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humour and Himself (1989). As cited in Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall De Bruhl (eds.)International Thesaurus of Quotations (1996), 601.
Skepticism is a useful tool of the inquisitive mind, but it is scarcely a method of investigation.
— James Thurber
(1928). As quoted, without source, in James P. Vanyo, 'The Legal System: Can it be Analyzed to Suit the Scientist?', Jurimetric Journal (Winter 1973), 14, No. 2, 106.
To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of Life.
— James Thurber
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
— James Thurber
In 'The Owl Who Was God', The New Yorker (25 Apr 1949).
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) -- 
