James Bryant Conant quotes
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“Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.”
-- James Bryant ConantSource : Personal Quote, www.imdb.com.
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“Just like a turtle, we only make progress if we stick our neck out.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
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“Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten.”
-- James Bryant ConantSource : Diary as freshman at Harvard College (1910 - 1911)
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“The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“Public education is a great instrument of social change. Through it, if we so desire, we can make our country more nearly a democracy without classes. To do so will require the efforts of us all-teachers, administrators, taxpayers and statesmen. Education is a social process, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
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“There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science-that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.”
-- James Bryant ConantSource : Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Times, 13 Aug. 1945
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“The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.”
-- James Bryant ConantSource : 1950 Of Washington. Letter to Bernard Baruch, Feb. Quoted in James G Hershberg James B Conant (1993).
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“Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence.”
-- James Bryant ConantSource : James Bryant Conant (1942). “Our Fighting Faith: Five Addresses to College Students”, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
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“Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
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“Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. . . . There will always be the false snobbery which tries to place one vocation above another. You will become a member of the aristocracy in the American sense only if your accomplishments and integrity earn this appellation.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“In every section of the entire area where the word science may properly be applied, the limiting factor is a human one. We shall have rapid or slow advance in this direction or in that depending on the number of really first-class men who are engaged in the work in question. ... So in the last analysis, the future of science in this country will be determined by our basic educational policy.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
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“Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.”
-- James Bryant Conant -
“He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.”
-- James Bryant ConantSource : Quoted in Notes on the Harvard Tercentenary, ed. David McCord (1936)
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“A Harvard education consists of what you learn at Harvard while you are not studying.”
-- James Bryant ConantSource : Quoted in Time, 29 Sep 1986.
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