quotes about Fatal Mistakes

“I wanted to be a marine biologist my whole life until I graduated high school.”

“Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible.”

“The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!”

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

“One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.”

“I watched children dying. That will be the image that will stay with me”

“I shall never forget my admiration for that German pilot, who single handed, fought seven of us for ten minutes. I saw him go into a fairly steep dive and so I continued to watch, and then saw the triplane hit the ground and disappear into a thousand fragments, for it seemed to me that it literally went into powder.”

Source : James McCudden (2009). “Flying Fury: Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps”, p.200, Casemate / Greenhill

“I'm curious to see what happens in England because in all this madness I think I can always go home to England and it'll all turn off.”

“There is no room in your mind for negative thoughts.”

“Leg locomotion was, for decades, thought to be an incredibly difficult problem. There has been very, very painstakingly slow progress there, and robots that essentially lumbered along at one step every 15 seconds and occasionally fell over.”