Woman was originally the inventor, the manufacturer, the provider. She has allowed one office after another gradually to slip from... her hand, until she retains, with loose grasp, only the so-called housekeeping.... Having thus given up one by one the occupations which required knowledge of materials and processes, and skill in using them ... she rightly feels that what's left is mere deadening drudgery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the element that distinguishes applied science from basic. Surprise is what makes the difference. When you are organized t...o apply knowledge, set up targets, produce a usable product, you require a high degree of certainty from the outset. All the facts on which you base protocols must be reasonably hard facts with unambiguous meaning. The challenge is to plan the work and organize the workers so that it will come out precisely as predicted. For this, you need centralized authority, elaborately detailed time schedules, and some sort of reward system based on speed and perfection. But most of all you need the intelligible basic facts to begin with, and these must come from basic research. There is no other source. In basic research, everything is just the opposite. What you need at the outset is a high degree of uncertainty; otherwise it isn't likely to be an important problem. You start with an incomplete roster of facts, characterized by their ambiguity; often the problem consists of discovering the connections between unrelated pieces of information. You must plan experiments on the basis of probability, even bare possibility, rather than certainty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always suspected that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is a boon to people who don't have deep feelings; their p...leasure comes from what they know about things, and their pride from showing off what they know. But this only emphasizes the difference between the artist and the scholar.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Upon the whole I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all of those difficulties, which have hitherto amused phil...osophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have raised a dust, and then complain that we cannot see.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this... faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or ...insignificance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Athletes and actors--let actors stand for the set of performing artists--share much. They share the need to make gesture as fluid ...and economical as possible, to make out of a welter of choices the single, precisely right one. They share the need for impeccable and split-second timing. They share the need for thousands of hours of practice in order to train the body to become the perfect, instinctive instrument to express. Both athlete and actor, out of that congeries of emotion, choice, strategy, knowledge of terrain, mood of spectators, condition of spectators in the ensemble, secret awareness of injury or weakness, and as nearly an absolute concentration as possible so that all externalities are integrated, all distraction absorbed to the self, must be able to change the self so successfully that it changes us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »