J. B. S. Haldane Short Quotes

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An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.

J. B. S. Haldane
I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.

J. B. S. Haldane
Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

J. B. S. Haldane
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

J. B. S. Haldane
Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.

J. B. S. Haldane
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.

J. B. S. Haldane
An "emergence" of life out of a Newtonian world would be a quite unintelligible miracle.

J. B. S. Haldane
A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.

J. B. S. Haldane
No-one could study mathematics intensively for more than five hours a day and remain sane.

J. B. S. Haldane
Shelly and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.

J. B. S. Haldane
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

J. B. S. Haldane
If physics and biology one day meet, and one of the two is swallowed up, that one will not be biology.

J. B. S. Haldane
If human beings could be propagated by cutting, like apple trees, aristocracy would be biologically sound.

J. B. S. Haldane
The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

J. B. S. Haldane
I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.

J. B. S. Haldane
The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".

J. B. S. Haldane
I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.

J. B. S. Haldane
In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

J. B. S. Haldane
I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.

J. B. S. Haldane
I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.

J. B. S. Haldane
"The results so far obtained are consistent with the view that..." has taken the place of "Thus saith the Lord..." as an introduction to a new theory.

J. B. S. Haldane
Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

J. B. S. Haldane
So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.

J. B. S. Haldane
The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.

J. B. S. Haldane
An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.

J. B. S. Haldane
We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

J. B. S. Haldane
Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.

J. B. S. Haldane
Four stages of acceptance: (a) this is worthless nonsense; (b) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; (c) this is true, but quite unimportant; (d) I always said so.

J. B. S. Haldane
I do not propose to argue the case for evolution, which I regard as being quite as well proven as most other historical facts, but to discuss its possible causes, which are certainly debatable.

J. B. S. Haldane
When asked by a group of theologians what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of His creation, Haldane is said to have answered, "An inordinate fondness for beetles."

J. B. S. Haldane