John Desmond Bernal Quotes

36 quotes in 753 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• In fact, we will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things. We have to learn to understand nature and…
• In England, more than in any other country, science is felt rather than thought. ... A defect of the English is their almost complete lack…
• Men will not be content to manufacture life: they will want to improve on it.
• The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.
• The full area of ignorance is not mapped. We are at present only exploring the fringes.
• 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…
• Pauling was shocked by the freedom with which the X-ray crystallographers of the time, including particularly Astbury, played with the intimate chemical structure of their…
• We will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things.
• A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because…
• Hunger and sex still dominate the primitive mammalian side of human existence, but at the present time it looks as if humanity were within sight…
• 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…
• Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world - a world which…
• All that glitters may not be gold, but at least it contains free electrons.
• 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 present aristocracy of western culture, at the moment when it most clearly dominates the world, is being imitated rapidly and successfully in every eastern…
• We academic scientists move within a certain sphere, we can go on being useless up to a point, in the confidence that sooner or later…
• 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,…
• 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,…

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