Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 6

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• The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Errors, Facts

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• We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time.

  Lewis Thomas

  Technology, Extra Time, Long

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Learning, Science

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• Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

  Lewis Thomas

  Alive, Thanks

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Man is embedded in nature.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Men, Embedded

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.

  Lewis Thomas

  Sleep, Thinking, Disease

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Most of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider it a lost week. Lots of that is due to mistakes and stupidity, but it could open a new line of inquiry. Something really good turns up once in a hundred times, but it makes the whole day worthwhile.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mistake, Stupidity, Encounters

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• When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

  Lewis Thomas

  Reading, Mean, Priorities

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• If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

  Lewis Thomas

  Warfare, Weaponry, Ifs

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• Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mean, Persistence, Survival

  Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

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• The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

  Lewis Thomas

  Cells, Diversity, Lightning

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Knowledge, Science

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• Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

  Lewis Thomas

  Development, Stage, Juvenile

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• Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time it doesn't happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path, I get surprised by an idea that I hadn't anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory.

  Lewis Thomas

  Writing, Garden, Thinking

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• It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage of my life.

  Lewis Thomas

  Memories, Science, Simple

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.

  Lewis Thomas

  Health, Pieces, Flapping

  Lewis Thomas (1972*). “Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy”, p.3, National Academies

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