Sam Kean famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.
-- Sam Kean

#War #Cutting #Men
Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the bodyâ€™s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. Theyâ€™re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run.
-- Sam Kean

#Running #Independent #People
Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.
-- Sam Kean

#Genius #Underestimate #Spite
So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just maybe, could have looked up into its cream and orange sky and seen the most spectacular show ever--fireworks lighting up the Jovian night with a trillion streaks of brilliant crimson, what scientists call neon rain.
-- Sam Kean

#Rain #Night #Sky
Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and youâ€™ll find them.
-- Sam Kean

#Balls #Looks #Elements
If anything runs deeper than a mathematicianâ€™s love of variables, itâ€™s a scientistâ€™s love of constants.
-- Sam Kean

#Running #Variables #Scientist
Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness.
-- Sam Kean

#Sexy #Art #Betray
Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago.
-- Sam Kean

#Cousin #Years #Earth
Iron is the final peal of a starâ€™s natural life.
-- Sam Kean

#Stars #Iron #Finals

Violence begets violence by whomever used. War is a dirty business and entails the use of degrading means, whoever wages it.
The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.
No war is inevitable until it breaks out.
Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.
I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.
You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.
I cannot understand how any man or woman can believe in the Lord's coming and not be a missionary, or at least committed to the work of missions with every power of his being.
A devotee should be fixed in the conclusion that, the spiritual master cannot be subject to criticism and should never be considered equal to a common man.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.

Sam Kean famous quotes

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