Joel Henry Hildebrand famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The men who have had the most to give to their fellow men are those who have enriched their minds and hearts in solitude. It is a poor education that does not fit a man to be alone with himself.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Broken Heart #Men #Giving
[About the demand of the Board of Regents of the University of California that professors sign non-Communist loyalty oaths or lose their jobs within 65 days.] No conceivable damage to the university at the hands of hypothetical Communists among us could possibly have equaled the damage resulting from the unrest, ill-will and suspicion engendered by this series of events.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Loyalty #Jobs #Science
The invention of IQ did a great disservice to creativity in education. ... Individuality, personality, originality, are too precious to be meddled with by amateur psychiatrists whose patterns for a "wholesome personality" are inevitably their own.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Creativity #Personality #Individuality
[I shall not] discuss scientific method, but rather the methods of scientists. We proceed by common sense and ingenuity. There are no rules, only the principles of integrity and objectivity, with a complete rejection of all authority except that of fact.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Integrity #Objectivity #Common Sense
Instead of adjusting students to docile membership in whatever group they happen to be placed, we should equip them to cope with their environment, not be adjusted to it, to be willing to stand alone, if necessary, for what is right and true.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Membership #Adjusting #Groups
How fortunate for civilization, that Beethoven, Michelangelo, Galileo and Faraday were not required by law to attend schools where their total personalities would have been operated upon to make them learn acceptable ways of participating as members of "the group."
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#School #Law #Civilization
The members of the department became like the Athenians who, according to the Apostle Paul, "spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing." Anyone who thought he had a bright idea rushed out to try it out on a colleague. Groups of two or more could be seen every day in offices, before blackboards or even in corridors, arguing vehemently about these 'brain storms.' It is doubtful whether any paper ever emerged for publication that had not run the gauntlet of such criticism. The whole department thus became far greater than the sum of its individual members.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Running #Ideas #Two
Anyone who thinks we can continue to have world wars but make them nice polite affairs by outlawing this weapon or that should meditate upon the outlawing of the cross-bow by Papal authority. Setting up the machinery for international law and order must surely precede disarmament. The Wild West did not abandon its shooting irons till after sheriffs and courts were established.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Nice #War #Thinking
That there is no such thing as the scientific method, one might easily discover by asking several scientists to define it. One would find, I am sure, that no two of them would exactly agree. Indeed, no two scientists work and think in just the same ways.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Hard Work #Thinking #Two
The best person able to appraise promise as a mathematician is a gifted teacher, and not a professional tester.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Teacher #Promise #Able
Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Birthday #Science #People
[When questioned on his longevity] First of all, I selected my ancestors very wisely. ... They were long-lived, healthy people. Then, as a chemist, I know how to eat, how to exercise, keep my blood circulating. ... I don't worry. I don't get angry at people. I don't worry about things I can't help. I do what I can to make the world a better place to live, but I don't complain if things aren't right. As a scientist I take the world as I find it.
-- Joel Henry Hildebrand

#Wisdom #Exercise #Science

You may also like:

Antoine Lavoisier
Chemist
August Kekule
Chemist
Dmitri Mendeleev
Chemist
Ernest Rutherford
Physicist
Gilbert N. Lewis
Chemist
Irving Langmuir
Researcher
John Dalton
Chemist
Linus Pauling
Chemist
Niels Bohr
Physicist
Robert S. Mulliken
Physicist
Svante Arrhenius
Scientist
Walther Nernst
Chemist