[B]y going to the College [William and Mary] I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me; ...and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws ...of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival c...an ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light... justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, th...ey do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human ...imaginative values which science has evolved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is ...cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It looks as if we may be presented with a kind of vast municipal fire station.... What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle o...n the face of a much loved and elegant friend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm... and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »