George Porter famous quotes

06-16-2025

To solve a problem is to create new problems, new knowledge immediately reveals new areas of ignorance, and the need for new experiments. At least, in the field of fast reactions, the experiments do not take very long to perform.
-- George Porter

#Ignorance #Knowledge #Long
To feed applied science by starving basic science is like economising on the foundations of a building so that it may be built higher. It is only a matter of time before the whole edifice crumbles.
-- George Porter

#Foundation #May #Matter
Should we force science down the throats of those that have no taste for it ? Is it our duty to drag them kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century ? I am afraid that it is.
-- George Porter

#Fun #Science #Twenties
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
-- George Porter

#War #Successful #Green World
Science is, on the whole, an informal activity, a life of shirt sleeves and coffee served in beakers.
-- George Porter

#Coffee #Science #Shirts
Tonight I should like to thank all those who have shared my work and to acknowledge the debt that I owe to my wife whose encouragement to put research before all other things has been a great strength to me.
-- George Porter

#Encouragement #Wife #Tonight
It is not only my laboratory and my place of work but also my home, so that on the 30th October I was able to share my happiness immediately with my students and collaborators and, at the same time, with my wife and family.
-- George Porter

#Happiness #Home #Wife

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.
There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.
Ignorance of the law excuses no man from practicing it.
The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.
It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.
When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.
It's been so long and I'm lost without you, what am I gonna do? I been needin' you, wantin' you, wonderin' if you're the same and who's been with you. Is your heart still mine? I wanna cry sometimes ... I miss you.

George Porter famous quotes

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