"Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow."

--

Source : Address to the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awards banquet, The Globe and Mail, November 27, 2004.

John Charles Polanyi

#Spring Quotes #Ideas Quotes #Flow Quotes

“Obamas IRS is not the IRS Ive ever known for over seventy years as an American citizen.”
“When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell... I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going.”
“There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.”
“As the joke goes, you donâ€™t have to be faster than the wolf chasing you, just faster than everyone else running away.”
“The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.”
“Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.”
“Boxing is a buzz, but I went into it to make a living. I wasn't going to go into the ring and get punched in the head for the fun of it.”
“You need to overcome the tug of people against you as you reach for high goals.”

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