About Quote by Lewis Thomas

“Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.” quote by Lewis Thomas — Download Open image

“Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.”

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 stamped with stereotyped, unalterable patterns of response, ready to be released. And the behavior released in us, by such confrontations, is, essentially, a surprised affection. It is compulsory behavior and we can avoid it only by…

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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…

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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 in every imaginable social arrangement...We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness in each of us, but the mechanism…

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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…

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

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

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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,…

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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,…

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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 seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of nature. But if we keep at it and keep alive, we are in for one surprise after another. We can…

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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.

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“Nature abhors a long silence.”

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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…

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