Layman Quotes - Page 2

• Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that 'language' themselves just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs. Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way.

  Howard S. Becker

  Musical, Needs, Use

  "Visual Research Methods". Book by Peter Hamilton, 2006.

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• From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.

  Victor Francis Hess

  Years, Might, Fields

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• Isolated, so-called "pretty theorems" have even less value in the eyes of a modern mathematician than the discovery of a new "pretty flower" has to the scientific botanist, though the layman finds in these the chief charm of the respective sciences.

  Hermann Hankel

  Flower, Eye, Discovery

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• More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

  Simone Weil

  Inspirational, Motivational, Respect

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• Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.

  John Wesley

  Giving, Heaven, Desire

  John Wesley (1960). “The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley ...”

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• One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

  Aldo Leopold

  Believe, Doctors, Land

  Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.165, Oxford University Press

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• All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

  Roger Bacon

  People, Brain, Facts

  1267 OpusMajus, pt.4, ch.1 (translated by Robert Belle Burke, 1928).

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• And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!

  Georges Bernanos

  Men, Justice, Police

  Georges Bernanos, Rémy Rougeau (2002). “The Diary of a Country Priest”, p.163, Da Capo Press

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• Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.

  Amos Tversky

  Wisdom, Mistake, Fall

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• There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death.

  Hippocrates

  Art, Pain, Mean

  Hippocrates, Paul Potter (1984). “Hippocrates”

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• A critic is a person who rationalizes his likes and dislikes in such impressive language that the layman thinks he is reasoning instead of rationalizing.

  Helen McCloy

  Thinking, Likes And Dislikes, Language

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• To put it in layman's terms, crazy is crazy. And crazy will find a way to do something crazy. Racist is racist. And racist people will find a way to project their racism onto the world.

  Nia Long

  Crazy, Racism, People

  Source: www.elle.com

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• The right to be heard would be, in many cases, of little avail if it did not comprehend the right to be heard by counsel. Even the intelligent and educated layman has small and sometimes no skill in the science of law.

  George Sutherland

  Intelligent, Law, Skills

  Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, (53), 1932.

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• The purpose of this book is to supply, in the form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy.

  Benjamin Graham

  Book, Adoption, Purpose

  Benjamin Graham (2009). “The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed”, p.1, Harper Collins

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• Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Fields, Common, Scientist

  Erwin Chargaff (1977). “Voices in the labyrinth: nature, man, and science”, Harper San Francisco

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• A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.

  John Dryden

  Poetry, Checks, Priests

  John Dryden (2016). “The Works of John Dryden, Vol.2: Top English Literature”, p.292, VM eBooks

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• Every interview I do, when I'm asked about scientific issues, I say I'm not a climate scientist. I'm just giving you the informed layman's perspective... .

  Myron Ebell

  Issues, Giving, Perspective

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• A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.

  Leonard Susskind

  Ideas, Research, Daydreaming

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• Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword "scientific objectivity" and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Doors, Objectivity, Bears

  Richard M. Weaver, Ted J. Smith (2000). “In defense of tradition: collected shorter writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• Sometimes when you're listening to a neuroscientist, they have a tendency to use a particular type of jargon that works in their world perfectly but that would lose the average layman.

  Pharrell Williams

  Average, Listening, Use

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Philosophy can help laymen spot and reject the numerous pseudoscientific beliefs that survive in the media, such as the fantasies of psychoanalysts, evolutionary psychologists, and economic equilibrium theorists.

  Mario Bunge

  Philosophy, Media, Helping

  Source: deutsche-denker.de

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• Certain signs, some of them visible to the layman as well as the scientist, indicate that we have been watching an ice age approach for some time without realizing what we are seeing... Scientists predict that it will cause great snows which the world has not seen since the last ice age thousands of years ago.

  Betty Friedan

  Years, Ice, Snow

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• I was very much the laymen, trying to find stuff out because I'm curious about the world.

  Dallas Campbell

  Trying, Stuff, World

  Source: collider.com

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• There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

  Noam Chomsky

  Criticism, Body, Information

  Noam Chomsky (2010). “The Chomsky Reader”, p.67, Pantheon

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• It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Men, Discovery

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