John Desmond Bernal Short Quotes

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

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

John Desmond Bernal
Science, in one aspect, is ordered technique; in another, it is rationalized mythology.

John Desmond Bernal
If science were communism, was it also not possible that communism could itself become a science?

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

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

John Desmond Bernal
Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.

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
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
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
But if capitalism had built up science as a productive force, the very character of the new mode of production was serving to make capitalism itself unnecessary.

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 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
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