C.P. Snow famous quotes

04-13-2025

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

#Light #Creative #Black
Zeroth law: You must play the game First law: You can't win Second law: You can't break even Third law: You can't quit the game.
-- C.P. Snow

#Winning #Law #Games
The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.
-- C.P. Snow

#Happy #Pursuit Of Happiness #Phrases
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
-- C.P. Snow

#Hero #Acceptance #Men
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

#Law #People #Good Man
The scientific process has two motives: one is to understand the natural world, the other is to control it.
-- C.P. Snow

#Two #World #Natural
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

#Two #Culture #Purpose
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

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

#Men #Forgiving #Want
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

#Husband #Father #Science
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

#Past #Thinking #Years
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

#Science #Past #Giving
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

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

#Science #Biographies #Type
Try as I might, I could never feel any great affection for a man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska - sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.
-- C.P. Snow

#Sweet #Men #Alaska
A scientist has to be neutral in his search for the truth, but he cannot be neutral as to the use of that truth when found. If you know more than other people, you have more responsibility, rather than less.
-- C.P. Snow

#Knowledge #Responsibility #People
I should never have made a good scientist, but I should have made a perfectly adequate one.
-- C.P. Snow

#Adequate #Scientist #Made
I felt I was moving among two groups [literary intellectuals and scientists] comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington Hom or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.
-- C.P. Snow

#Ocean #Moving #Two
Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.
-- C.P. Snow

#Civilization #Coats #Horror
The main issue [of the Scientific Revolution] is that the people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.
-- C.P. Snow

#Country #Issues #People
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

#Two #Groups #Scientist
Advertising degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will to choose.
-- C.P. Snow

#People #Advertising #Appeals
Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.
-- C.P. Snow

#History #Half #Nine
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

#Mean #Understanding #Ignorant
If you pursue happiness you never find it.
-- C.P. Snow

#Happiness #Pursue
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

#Technology #Eden #Space
I was moving among two groups... who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral, and psychological climate had so little in common that... one might have crossed the ocean.
-- C.P. Snow

#Moving #Ocean #Two

You may also like:

Alan Sokal
Professor
Anthony Powell
Novelist
Anthony Trollope
Novelist
Bertrand Russell
Philosopher
David Hilbert
Mathematician
Evelyn Waugh
Writer
F. R. Leavis
G. H. Hardy
Mathematician
George Polya
Mathematician
Graham Greene
Writer
John Cage
Composer
John Churton Collins
Literary critic
Leonhard Euler
Mathematician
Norman O. Brown
Writer
Pamela Hansford Johnson
Novelist
Paul Erdos
Mathematician
Simon Raven
Novelist
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Mathematician
Stefan Collini
Academic
William Manchester
Author