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In England, more than in any other country, science is felt rather than thought. ... A defect of the English is their almost complete lack of systematic thinking. Science to them consists of a number of successful raids into the unknown.

John Desmond Bernal

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John Desmond Bernal
Age: 70 †
Born: 1901
Born: May 10
Died: 1971
Died: September 15
Biophysicist
Crystallographer
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Philosopher
Philosopher Of Science
Physicist
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Hollywood
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Desmond Bernal
J. D. Bernal
John Bernal
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More quotes by John Desmond Bernal

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The psychology of a complex mind must differ almost as much from that of a simple, mechanized mind as its psychology would from ours because something that must underlie and perhaps be even greater than sex is involved.
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The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.
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The only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience.
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Her [Rosalind Franklin] devotion to research showed itself at its finest in the last months of her life. Although stricken with an illness which she knew would be fatal, she continued to work right up to the end.
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Published papers may omit important steps and the memory of men of science, even the greatest, is sadly fallible.
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As a scientist Miss [Rosalind] Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.
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The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development.
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The greater the man, the more he is soaked in the atmosphere of his time only thus can he get a wide enough grasp of it to be able to change substantially the pattern of knowledge and action.
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As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt.
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Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it.
John Desmond Bernal
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The full area of ignorance is not mapped. We are at present only exploring the fringes.
John Desmond Bernal
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We will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things.
John Desmond Bernal
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The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed.
John Desmond Bernal
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It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.
John Desmond Bernal
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So many of the chemical reactions occurring in living systems have been shown to be catalytic processes occurring isothermally on the surface of specific proteins, referred to as enzymes, that it seems fairly safe to assume that all are of this nature and that the proteins are the necessary basis for carrying out the processes that we call life.
John Desmond Bernal
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The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment for it of all present art, rather it will mean the completion of the transformation of art that has already begun.
John Desmond Bernal
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The very bulk of scientific publications is itself delusive. It is of very unequal value a large proportion of it, possibly as much as three-quarters, does not deserve to be published at all, and is only published for economic considerations which have nothing to do with the real interests of science.
John Desmond Bernal
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If science were communism, was it also not possible that communism could itself become a science?
John Desmond Bernal
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The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them.
John Desmond Bernal
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Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license.
John Desmond Bernal