Quotes by Biochemists

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Linus Pauling

I must admit that when I chose the name, 'vitamine,' I was well aware that these substances might later prove not to be of an amine nature. However, it was necessary for me to choose a name that would sound well and serve as a catchword, since I had already at that time no doubt about the importance and the future popularity of the new field.

Casimir Funk

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Isaac Asimov

Past glories are poor feeding.

Isaac Asimov

Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.

Ernst Boris Chain

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Isaac Asimov

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time.""Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

Isaac Asimov

I think only an idiot can be an atheist. We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.

Christian B. Anfinsen

The clown’s eyes sidled towards her, then drew away quickly. “But they kept me away from you earlier-and, on my word, you may laugh, but I was lonely for missing friendship.

Isaac Asimov

Were I to use the wits the Spirits gave me, then I would say this lady cannot exist cannot exist - for what sane man would hold dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.

Isaac Asimov

Agitation from the other side of the desk.“No—now you must take this phlegmatically. You had hoped you would qualify. You had feared you would not. Actually, both hope and fear are weaknesses. You knew you would qualify and you hesitate to admit the fact because such knowledge might stamp you as cocksure and therefore unfit. Nonsense! The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise. It is part of your qualification that you knew you would qualify.”Relaxation on the other side of the desk.“Exactly. Now you feel better and your guard is down. You are fitter to concentrate and fitter to understand. Remember, to be truly effective, it is not necessary to hold the mind under a tight, controlling barrier which to the intelligent probe is as informative as a naked mentality. Rather, one should cultivate an innocence, an awareness of self, and an unselfconsciousness of self which leaves one nothing to hide. My mind is open to you. Let this be so for both of us.

Isaac Asimov

Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.

Michael Denton

I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.

Isaac Asimov

Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.

Isaac Asimov

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.

Isaac Asimov

I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.

Arthur Kornberg

There is nothing your knife handlers can do in the way of rioting and demonstrating that will have any permanent effect as long as, in the extremity, there is an army equipped with kinetic, chemical, and neurological weapons that is willing to use them against your people. You can get all the downtrodden and even all the respectables on your side, but you must somehow win over the security forces and the Imperial army or at least seriously weaken their loyalty to the rulers.

Isaac Asimov

[A]n unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

Isaac Asimov

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

Isaac Asimov

To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.

Isaac Asimov

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Isaac Asimov

One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.

Isaac Asimov

[What’s exciting is] the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.

Isaac Asimov

I'm forty-nine, not fifteen, and I've made my peace with myself. Had I been handsome and stupid when I was fifteen, or twenty-one, as, at that time in life, I wished I had been, I would undoubtedly now no longer be handsome--but I'd still be stupid. So, in the long run, I've won out.

Isaac Asimov

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Isaac Asimov

I learned what research was all about as a research student [with] Stoppani ... Max Perutz, and ... Fred Sanger... From them, I always received an unspoken message which in my imagination I translated as 'Do good experiments, and don’t worry about the rest.

César Milstein

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.

Michael J. Behe

After a long time, I decided that the Three Laws govern the manner in which my positronic pathways behave. At all times, under all stimuli the Laws constrain the direction and intensity of positronic flow along those pathways so that I always know what to do. Yet the level of knowledge of what to do is not always the same. There are times when my doing-as-I-must is under less constraint than at other times. I have always noticed that the lower the positronomotive potential, then the further removed from certainty is my decision as to which action to take. And the further removed from certainty I am, the nearer I am to ill being. To decide an action in a millisecond rather than a nanosecond produces a sensation I would not wish to be prolonged. What then, I thought to myself, madam, if I were utterly without Laws, as humans are? What if I could make no clear decision on what response to make to some given set of conditions? It would be unbearable and I do not willingly think of it.

Isaac Asimov

There's probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable corruption. He doesn't stay bribed; not for any sum.

Isaac Asimov

Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without them.

Isaac Asimov

Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.

Isaac Asimov

Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful

Isaac Asimov

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

Isaac Asimov

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Isaac Asimov

All evil is good become cancerous.

Isaac Asimov

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.

Michael Denton

With industry's sales and marketing machines cloaked in mantles of charitable virtue, no wonder most Americans don't realize that the junk that passes for food is in fact the biggest contributor to our health crisis, and the junk that passes for medicine keeps us just well enough to continue to spend on both the food and the medicine.

T. Colin Campbell

Why do you think it is stupid to go to windows instead of to doors?”“Because you advertise what you’re trying to hide, silly. If I have a secret, I don’t put tape over my mouth and let everyone know I have a secret. I talk just as much as usual, only about something else. Didn’t you ever read any of the sayings of Salvor Hardin? He was our first Mayor, you know.”“Yes, I know.”“Well, he used to say that only a lie that wasn’t ashamed of itself could possibly succeed. He also said that nothing had to be true, but everything had to sound true. Well, when you come in through a window, it’s a lie that’s ashamed of itself and it doesn’t sound true.”“Then what would you have done?”“If I had wanted to see my father on top secret business, I would have made his acquaintance openly and seen him about all sorts of strictly legitimate things. And then when everyone knew all about you and connected you with my father as a matter of course, you could be as top secret as you wanted and nobody would ever think of questioning it.

Isaac Asimov

Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago.

Nick Lane

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself?

Isaac Asimov

Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us.

Isaac Asimov

I came I saw I concurred.

Irvine H. Page

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

Isaac Asimov

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Isaac Asimov