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Technology…is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
C. P. Snow
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Civilization is hideously fragile, you know that; there's not much between us and the horrors underneath. Just about a coat of varnish, wouldn't you say.
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I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
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By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.
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It takes a very strong head to keep secrets for years and not go slightly mad. It isn't wise to be advised by anyone slightly mad.
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Engineers have to live their lives in an organized community, and however odd they are underneath they manage to present a disciplined face to the world.
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Scientific work... has a value of its own, whether you're liking it or not. It's — there. It's permanent. It's work which is always going to last. It's a real creation.
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But after the idyllic years of science, we passed into a tempest of history; and by an unfortunate coincidence, we passed into a technological tempest, too.
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The scientific process has two motives: one is to understand the natural world, the other is to control it.
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The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.
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There is a moral component right in the grain of science itself...
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Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.
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No scientist or student of science, need ever read an original work of the past. As a general rule, he does not think of doing so. Rutherford was one of the greatest experimental physicists, but no nuclear scientist today would study his researches of fifty years ago. Their substance has all been infused into the common agreement, the textbooks, the contemporary papers, the living present.
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For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.
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This ability to incorporate the past gives the sharpest diagnostic tool, if one asks whether a body of knowledge is a science or not. Do present practitioners have to go back to an original work of the past? Or has it been incorporated?... Science is cumulative, and embodies its past.
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What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.
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When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
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I should never have made a good scientist, but I should have made a perfectly adequate one.
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I think, on the whole that scientists make slightly better husbands and fathers than most of us, and I admire them for it.
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Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
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Most of the scientists I have known well have felt - just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well - that the individual condition of each is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.
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Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.
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Advertising "degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will to choose."
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A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
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The future of chemistry rests and must rest, with physics.
C. P. Snow
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Quote of the day
That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.
Jupiter Hammon
C. P. Snow
Born:
October 15, 1905
Died:
July 1, 1980
(aged 74)
Bio:
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow was an English physical chemist and novelist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government.
Known for:
The Two Cultures (1959)
Time of Hope (1949)
The New Men (1954)
Corridors of Power (1964)
The Light and the Dark (1947)
Most used words:
scientists
man
people
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