All Lewis Thomas Quotes
- Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and… Any
- I don't want to be reincarnated, that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family, friends - you don't… Additional
- I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics,… All
- In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course… Among
- It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through,… Alternatives
- Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would… Ago
- Most of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider it a lost… Consider
- The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible… Agreed
- The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of… Absolute
- 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 cell,… Accountable
- We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the… Always Supposed
- We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature... In this scenario, Man comes… Been
- We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since… Behave
- We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to… All
- Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is… Amiable
- The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be… Anaerobic
- The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance Accomplishment
- I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as… Any
- It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so… Ago
- Good science is done by being curious in general, by asking questions all around, by acknowledging the likelihood of being wrong and taking this in… Acknowledging
- It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled… Asking
- We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial… Ahead
- The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden… Century
- As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still… All
- I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an… Behave