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In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

John B. S. Haldane

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John B. S. Haldane
Age: 72 †
Born: 1892
Born: November 5
Died: 1964
Died: December 1
Biochemist
Biologist
Geneticist
Physiologist
Scientist
University Teacher
Hartford
Connecticut
J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
Much
Fact
Arousing
Kind
Words
Adapted
Facts
Precise
Thought
Description
Better
Symbols
Wells
Kinds
Well
Atheism
Many
Emotion

More quotes by John B. S. Haldane

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Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.
John B. S. Haldane
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Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.
John B. S. Haldane
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An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.
John B. S. Haldane
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There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
John B. S. Haldane
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Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.
John B. S. Haldane
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An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.
John B. S. Haldane
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This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.
John B. S. Haldane
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The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
John B. S. Haldane
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So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.
John B. S. Haldane
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Einstein - the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.
John B. S. Haldane
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Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.
John B. S. Haldane
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Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. What inference, asked the latter, might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works? Haldane replied: An inordinate fondness for beetles.
John B. S. Haldane
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I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.
John B. S. Haldane
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Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.
John B. S. Haldane
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I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.
John B. S. Haldane
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Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.
John B. S. Haldane
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You can analyze a glass of water and you're left with a lot of chemical components, but nothing you can drink.
John B. S. Haldane
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If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.
John B. S. Haldane
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We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
John B. S. Haldane
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The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.
John B. S. Haldane