Century Quotes by Lewis Thomas

9 Century quotes by Lewis Thomas

Lewis Thomas offers nine succinct thoughts on the century. The short collection provides a quick, thoughtful glimpse into his scientific and philosophical musings.

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If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner…

Lewis Thomas

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The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

Lewis Thomas

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The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever…

Lewis Thomas

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We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms…

Lewis Thomas

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We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European…

Lewis Thomas

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Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement…

Lewis Thomas

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I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At…

Lewis Thomas

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Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time, and we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real…

Lewis Thomas

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The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It…

Lewis Thomas

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“We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are…

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We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness…

Lewis Thomas

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“It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize…

Lewis Thomas

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It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by…

Lewis Thomas

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If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.

Lewis Thomas

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Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

Lewis Thomas

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I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst,…

Lewis Thomas

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It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity,…

Lewis Thomas

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The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we…

Lewis Thomas

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I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.

Lewis Thomas

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“Nature abhors a long silence.”

Lewis Thomas

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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most…

Lewis Thomas

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We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature;…

Lewis Thomas

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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…

Lewis Thomas

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Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by…

Lewis Thomas

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