American Chemist Quotes

Harold Urey

Robert Burns Woodward

James Bryant Conant

Gilbert N. Lewis

Theodore William Richards

Willard Libby

William Lipscomb

Observations are useless until they have been interpreted.

Edgar Bright Wilson

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.

Many thanks for the sending me the book Biology of the Striped Skunk...Frankly, I doubt whether I shall read it or not, unless I happen to have some intimate contact with a skunk which may induce me to learn more about him.

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

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

Paul Doughty Bartlett

Scientists know that research merely discloses parts of the infinite unknown. Paradoxically, the enticing, helpful "unknown" increases as men continue to subtract from it. Progress in every line of experimental science follows the same law. The apparently narrow path gradually expands into unlimited, unexplored territory.

Willis R. Whitney

Practically everything your eat, taste, wear, smell and see has resulted in some way from the ingenuity of chemists.

Marston T. Bogert

The fascination of a growing science lies in the work of the pioneers at the very borderland of the unknown, but to reach this frontier one must pass over well traveled roads; of these one of the safest and surest is the broad highway of thermodynamics.

Anyone who wishes to grow over their lifetime needs criticism.

Scientists need to exchange ideas in an informal place.

Some sort of false logic has crept into our schools, for the people whom I have seen doing housework or cooking know nothing of botany or chemistry, and the people who know botany and chemistry do not cook or sweep. The conclusion seems to be, if one knows chemistry she must not cook or do housework.

Ellen Swallow Richards

Surprisingly, history is much more difficult than chemistry.

Frank Westheimer

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

... when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.

K. Barry Sharpless

The periodic law has given to chemistry that prophetic power long regarded as the peculiar dignity of its sister science, astronomy.

Henry Carrington Bolton

To many physical chemists in the 1920's and early 1930's, the organic chemist was a grubby artisan engaged in an unsystematic search for new compounds, a search which was strongly influenced by the profit motive.

Louis Plack Hammett

Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist.

No one can predict how far we shall be enabled by means of our limited intelligence to penetrate into the mysteries of a universe immeasurably vast and wonderful; nevertheless, each step in advance is certain to bring new blessings to humanity and new inspiration to greater endeavor.

Theodore William Richards

Boyle entertains the hypothesis of a universal matter, the concept of atoms of different shapes and sizes, and the possibility of existence of substances that might properly be called elements... The atomic theory as originally conceived by Democritus and Epicurus, developed by Lucretius, and resurrected by Gassendi from about 1647 on, was doubtless the source from which Boyle derived his ideas,...as he cites both Epicurus and Gassendi. Boyle, however... avoids any dogmatic assertion of these hypotheses. It is plain, however, that these atoms or "corpuscles" as he calls them are a constant element of his thought.

John Maxson Stillman

See all electrons are alike, and presumably leave no trail behind them, we cannot say that atom A loses an electron to atom B and atom C to atom D, but only that Atoms A and C have each lost an electron and atoms B and D have each gained one.

Gilbert N. Lewis

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

We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.

Albert C. Barnes

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

Herman Francis Mark

A child of the new generation Refused to learn multiplication. He said 'Don't conclude That I'm stupid or rude; I am simply without motivation.'

Joel Henry Hildebrand

We can put it down as one of the principles learned from the history of science that a theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts.

James Bryant Conant