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I, Galileo, son of the late Vicenzo Galilei, swear that I never said that the prime numbers are useless. What I said was that you cannot count lunar craters by counting 2, 3, 5, 7.

Galileo Galilei

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Galileo Galilei
Age: 77 †
Born: 1564
Born: February 15
Died: 1642
Died: January 8
Astrologer
Astronomer
Engineer
Inventor
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Polymath
Scientist
University Teacher
Galileo
G. Galilei
Numbers
Galileo
Cannot
Counting
Never
Swear
Prime
Count
Useless
Son
Craters
Late
Lunar

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They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment and growth of the arts not their dimination or destruction.
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I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands perpetually open before our eyes, though since it is written in characters different from those of our alphabet it cannot be read by everyone.
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They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses.
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Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?
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Some, merely to contradict what I had said, did not scruple to cast doubt upon things they had seen with their own eyes again and again.
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But, because my private lectures and domestic pupils are a great hinderance and intteruption of my studies, I wish to live entirely exempt from the former, and in great measure from the latter. ... in short, I should wish to gain my bread from my writings.
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There are those who reason well, but they are greatly outnumbered by those who reason badly.
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Measure what can be measured, and make measureable what cannot be measured.
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It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
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The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.
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I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel.
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Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
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I would beg the wise and learned fathers [of the church] to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration.
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