Robert Watson-Watt Quotes

• Give me the third best technology. The second best won't be ready in time. The best will never be ready.

  Robert Watson-Watt

  Time, Science, Technology

  "The Lost Art of the Great Speech: How to Write It, How to Deliver It" by Richard Dowis, (p. 150), 2000.

  16 Copy quote

• There are few humanities that could surpass in discipline, in beauty, in emotional and aesthetic satisfaction, those humanities which are called mathematics, and the natural sciences.

  Robert Watson-Watt

  Emotional, Discipline, Humanity

  8 Copy quote

• The three most effective incentives to human action may be ... classified as creed, greed and dread. ... In examining the scientist it is perhaps worth while to examine how far he is moved by these three incentives. I think that, rather peculiarly and rather exceptionally, he is very little moved by dread. ... He is in fact essentially a person who has been taught he must be fearless in his dealing with facts.

  Robert Watson-Watt

  Science, Thinking, Effectiveness

  7 Copy quote

• There is a great deal of emotional satisfaction in the elegant demonstration, in the elegant ordering of facts into theories, and in the still more satisfactory, still more emotionally exciting discovery that the theory is not quite right and has to be worked over again, very much as any other work of art-a painting, a sculpture has to be worked over in the interests of aesthetic perfection. So there is no scientist who is not to some extent worthy of being described as artist or poet.

  Robert Watson-Watt

  Art, Science, Emotional

  8 Copy quote

• [The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration.

  Robert Watson-Watt

  Believe, Knowledge, Science

  7 Copy quote

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin