20th-century Chemist Quotes

Dorothy Hodgkin

Oliver Sacks

Harold Urey

Ilya Prigogine

Robert Burns Woodward

Albert Hofmann

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

Ernst Otto Fischer

The details of a research career are dictated partly by accident, but largely by inclinations and temperament.

Arthur Birch (organic chemist)

The concept of "free radicals" was not known in 1920 — well perhaps in politics, but not in chemistry.

Herman Francis Mark

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

The greatest problem encountered by students in geology is the necessity for a complete reorganization of their concepts of space and time.

A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease, so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety!

Kathleen Lonsdale

Funny, I'd forgotten that what comes to you when you take a psychedelic is not always a revelation of something new and startling; you're more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot you knew - seeing them freshly - old, basic truths that long ago became cliches, so you stopped paying attention to them.

The exact verbal definition of qualitative concepts is more often the province of philosophy than of physical science.

Scientific discovery rarely follows a smooth and orderly course. Like most natural processes it proceeds spasmodically, and important results frequently come only after long-drawn-out, exhausting, and apparently fruitless endeavor, sometimes even almost by what appears to be a lucky chance.

The essence of chemical science thus finds its full expression in the words of Leonardo da Vinci: "Where nature finishes producing its own species, man begins, using natural things and in harmony with this very nature, to create an infinity of species."

Jean-Marie Lehn

Science is not only for illumination, for the mastery of nature's resources and the improvement of man's estate, it is also for the satisfaction of the soul.

George William Gray

That we live on land is, in the grander scheme of things, best regarded as an anomaly, or even an eccentricity — albeit with sound evolutionary justification. The story of life is, if we retain a true sense of proportion, a story of life at sea.

We know light best in its diluted form: a gentle rain of photons falling from the sun that illuminates and warms. More concentrated, light is a furnace and a terror.

George M. Whitesides

Observations are useless until they have been interpreted.

Edgar Bright Wilson

Science is today one of the few common languages of mankind; it can provide a basis for understanding and communication of ideas between people that is independent of political boundaries and ideologies.

George Kistiakowsky

Through science, we have an automatic and absolutely necessary vehicle for outreach which joins the people of the world in a common enterprise perhaps unparalleled in its self-sustaining nature by any of the other many and important common enterprises of humankind.

George S. Hammond

Every discovery takes place in more than a scientific context.

Charles J. Pedersen

Anyone who has acquired sufficient skill to make an exact analysis satisfactorily can adapt himself to the performance of a less accurate one — but the reverse is not true.

Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target.

Homer Burton Adkins

The nature of the chemical bond is the problem at the heart of all chemistry.

Among nonclassical ions the ratio of conceptual difficulty to molecular weight reaches a maximum with the cyclopropylcarbinyl-cyclobutyl system.

Paul Doughty Bartlett

Chlorine is a poisonous gas. In case I should fall over unconscious in the following demonstration involving chlorine, please pick me up and carry me into the open air. Should this happen, the lecture for the day will be concluded.

There is not a "pure" science. By this I mean that physics impinges on astronomy, on the one hand, and chemistry and biology on the other. And not only does each support neighbors, but derives sustenance from them. The same can be said of chemistry. Biology is, perhaps, the example par excellence today of an "impure" Science.

What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true.

F. Sherwood Rowland