John Desmond Bernal Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.

John Desmond Bernal
The central industry of modern civilisation, tending, because of its control over materials, to spread into and ultimately incorporate older industries such as mining, smelting, oil- refining, textiles, rubber, building, and even agriculture in respect to fertilizers and food processing.

John Desmond Bernal
Published papers may omit important steps and the memory of men of science, even the greatest, is sadly fallible.

John Desmond Bernal
One of the questions on which clarity of thinking is now most necessary is that of the relation between the methods of science and of Marxist philosophy. Although much has already been written on the subject, yet there is still an enormous amount of confusion and contradictory statement.

John Desmond Bernal
Hogben's Science for the Citizen would be an admirable text-book for such teaching.

John Desmond Bernal
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.

John Desmond Bernal
Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it.

John Desmond Bernal
In England, more than in any other country, science is felt rather than thought...A defect of the English is their almost complete lack of systematic thinking. Science to them consists of a number of successful raids into the unknown.

John Desmond Bernal
The greater the man, the more he is soaked in the atmosphere of his time; only thus can he get a wide enough grasp of it to be able to change substantially the pattern of knowledge and action.

John Desmond Bernal
The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed.

John Desmond Bernal
The cardinal rule in science is that a statement must be provable — but that does not mean that it has to be proved now.

John Desmond Bernal
The present aristocracy of western culture, at the very moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern country.

John Desmond Bernal
Once acclimatized to space living, it is unlikely that man will stop until he has roamed over and colonized most of the sidereal universe, or that even this will be the end. Man will not ultimately be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them and organize them for his own purposes.

John Desmond Bernal
All that glisters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons. [But consider the Golden Scarab Beetle which has a metallic lustre without metal.]

John Desmond Bernal
The old chemistry was largely a matter of memory, a set of cookery recipes that had, for no apparent reason but to worry the student, to be learnt by heart.

John Desmond Bernal
The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.

John Desmond Bernal
The very bulk of scientific publications is itself delusive. It is of very unequal value; a large proportion of it, possibly as much as three-quarters, does not deserve to be published at all, and is only published for economic considerations which have nothing to do with the real interests of science.

John Desmond Bernal
It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.

John Desmond Bernal
[The goal of efficiency was] a system in which all relevant information would be available to each research worker in an amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance.

John Desmond Bernal
The key word in the structure of liquids is the one which Humpty Dumpty used in Alice Through the Looking Glass, 'impenetrability'.

John Desmond Bernal
In fact, we will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things. We have to learn to understand nature and not merely to observe it and endure what it imposes on us. Stupidity, from being an amiable individual defect, has become a social crime.

John Desmond Bernal
The problem of the re-organization of science will not be solved by administrative or financial changes. It will also be necessary to reorganise in a most comprehensive way the whole apparatus of scientific communication.

John Desmond Bernal
We care less about the more distant future, but to approach it at all we must divest ourselves of so many customary forms, that even the more enlightened prophets lets their imagination stop in some static Utopia in despite of all evidence pointing to ever increasing acceleration of change.

John Desmond Bernal
In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues, and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal.

John Desmond Bernal
It is not possible in any published book to speak freely and precisely about the way science is run. The law of liable, reasons of State, and still more the unwritten code of the scientific fraternity itself forbid particular examples being held up alike for praise or blame.

John Desmond Bernal