C. P. Snow Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

C. P. Snow
I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
The scientific process has two motives: one is to understand the natural world, the other is to control it.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
There is a moral component right in the grain of science itself...

C. P. Snow
Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
I should never have made a good scientist, but I should have made a perfectly adequate one.

C. P. Snow
I think, on the whole that scientists make slightly better husbands and fathers than most of us, and I admire them for it.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
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.

C. P. Snow
Advertising "degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will to choose."

C. P. Snow
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?

C. P. Snow
The future of chemistry rests and must rest, with physics.

C. P. Snow
Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.

C. P. Snow
I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right.

C. P. Snow
There is, of course, no complete solution. […] But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education […] There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves.

C. P. Snow
No one is fit to be trusted with power.... No one.... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. If he does not know it, he is not fit to govern others. And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate.

C. P. Snow
The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

C. P. Snow