Quotes of the sages down through the ages

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE:THIS WEEK, for your summer entertainment, I hand over this column to the words of some famous thinkers. Quotations are chosen because I find them striking, not necessarily because I agree with them all.

Hippocrates (460BC-377BC), Greek physician: "I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion."

– The Oath

Ronald W Reagan (1911-2004), 40th president of the United States: "I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born."

– Presidential campaign debate, 1980

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher: "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

– Beyond Good and Evil

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), English biologist: "Accuracy is the foundation of everything else."

– Collected Essays

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-born physicist: "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so."

– In S Brodetsky's Newton: Scientist and Man, Nature, Volume 150

Stafan Banach (1892-1945), Polish mathematician: "Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems or theories, the very best ones see analogies between analogies."

– In SM Ulam's Adventures of a Mathematician

Raymond Smullyan (b.1919), US mathematician and logician: "Recently, someone asked me if I believed in astrology. He seemed somewhat puzzled when I explained that the reason that I don't is because I'm a Gemini."

– 5000BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies

Richard P Feynman (1918-1988), US physicist: "The proteins of bacteria and the proteins of humans are the same. In fact it has recently been found that the protein-making machinery in the bacteria can be given orders from human red cells to produce red cell proteins. So close is life to life."

– The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist

Martin Gardner (born 1914), US writer and mathematics games editor: "Our entire universe may slowly stop expanding, go into a contracting phase, and finally disappear into a black hole, like a acrobatic elephant jumping into its anus."

– Science: Good, Bad and Bogus

Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), English chemist and physicist: "Chemists do not usually stutter. It would be very awkward if they did, seeing that they have at times to get out such words as methylethylamylophenylium."

– In William H Brock's The Norton History of Chemistry

Athol AW Johnson (No biographical data available): "In cases of masturbation we must, I believe, break the habit by inducing such a condition of the parts as will cause too much local suffering to allow of the practice to be continued. For this purpose, if the prepuce is long, we may circumcise the male patient with present and probably with future advantages; the operation, too, should not be performed under chloroform, so that the pain experienced may be associated with the habit we wish to eradicate."

– "On an Injurious Habit Occasionally Met with in Infancy and Early Childhood", The Lancet, Volume 1, 1860

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), US journalist and literary critic: "1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride."

– Prejudices: Third Series

Mark Twain (1835-1910), US writer and humorist: "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno."

– Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches Essays 1891-1910

Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), US journalist and humorist: "I wondher why ye can always read a doctor's bill an' ye niver can read his purscription?"

– Mr Dooley Says

Edgar R Fiedler (1916-2003), US economist: "Forecasting is very difficult, especially about the future."

William Reville is University College Cork’s associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer:

http://understandingscience.ucc.ie