Some quotations

• "Wer nicht von 3000 Jahren sich weiss, Rechenschaft zu geben, bleib im Dunkeln, unerfahren, mag Tag zu Tag leben." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
• Quotation of the Erkenntnistheoretiker, Paul Feierabend, who held professorships at Berkeley and the ETH. Feierabend erwähnt die guten Geschichten, die ihn allein an den Wissenschaften interessierten, die "immer bald standisiert, gelehrt, systematisiert, und in normal Scheisse verwandelt werden wurden". Text taken from the book, Verborgene Behinderungen, by Christian Mürner.
• From an American journalist's interview with Marie Curie around 1918 concerning the fact that despite the immense economic fortune the Curies could have obtained by patenting radium, the extraction of radium from pitchblend, etc.: "Ich erwähnte die Patente, die sie [Marie Curie] zu einer sehr reichen Frau hätten machen müssen. Rühig erwiderte sie, 'Das Radium soll niemandem reich machen. Es ist ein Element, und gehört also allen Menschen.'" The situation is strangely reminiscent of efforts to patent genes or the human genome. (Quotation taken from "Marie Curie", by Peter Ksoll.)
• Quotation of Galileo Galilei, around 1640, found in Galilée, by Ludovico Geymonat (see also complete works of Galileo VIII 521)

  Vous voyez donc comment le raisonnement mathématique sert à éviter ces écailles sûr lesquelles parfois le raisonnement pûrement éxperimentale court le risque de bouter et de se briser.

• Link to quotes of Jean-Louis Krivine, emeritus professor of mathematical logic and computer science at l'Université Denis Diderot de Paris (= Paris 7)
• Ratschluß des Magiers, by Alexandre Dumas (Memoires d'un medecin - Joseph Balsamo).

  Gilbert: "Ich habe den Ehrgeiz, Arzt zu werden".
  Monsieur: "Ein schöner und edler Beruf, bei dem man zwischen der wahren, anspruchslosen und opferbereiten Wissenschaft und der dreisten, mit Gold aufgewonenen, fettleibigen Scharlatanerie wählen kann. Wenn Sie die Wahrheit lieben, junger Mann, werden Sie Arzt. Lieben Sie den Glanz, dann geben Sie sich als Arzt aus."

• Sprüuche des Konfuzius by Schiller: "Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit, und im Abgrund wohnt die Wahrheit."

• "Der Mensch kann tun was er will, aber nicht wollen was er will." Schopenhauer, von Einstein mehrmals zitiert.

• Unix is not user-unfriendly. It's just that Unix chooses its friends very carefully.

• "There is now an enormous amount of information on the events that take place in living systems at the molecular level. However, much of this information is qualitative and descriptive, even when the components involved are known and the structures of many of them (proteins and nucleic acids) have been determined. Many ingenious experiments have been done to establish which phenomena take place, but most of them do not address the question of why things happen the way they do. This is where the physical sciences, including thermodynamics, can make an essential contribution to biology." (Themis Lazaridis and Martin Karplus, page 3, "Microscopic basis of macromolecular thermodynamics", Thermodynamics in Biology, ed Enrico di Cera, Oxford University Press (2000))

• "The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water, welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot." (Henry Beston, The outermost house: A year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (1929))

• "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." (Isaac Newton, from p. 271 of World of Mathematics, ed. James R Newman)

• "There will always be exciting times for anyone who's in a position to be experimenting and doing new things, new music and so on. That's the lifeblood of the whole thing." (Woody Herman, from page 74 of Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz by Donald Maggin)

• "Life is a system that both stores and processes the information necessary for its own reproduction." (L.L Gatlin)

• "In fact, being able to predict a protein's structure from its amino acid sequence is one of the most important unsolved problems of molecular biology and biophysics. Not only would a successful prediction algorithm be a tremendous advance in the understanding of the biochemical mechanisms of proteins, but, since such an algorithm could conceivably be used to design proteins to carry out specific functions, it would have profound, far-reaching effects on biotechnology and the treatment of disease." (M. Mitchell, page 62, An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms 1998)

• "Survival machines began as passive receptacles for the genes, providing little more than walls to protect them from the chemical warfare of their rivals and the ravages of accidental molecular bombardment. In the early days they `fed' on organic molecules freely available in the soup." (R. Dawkins, page 46, The Selfish Gene (1989))

• "But there is nothing magic about Darwinian fitness in the genetic sense. There is no law giving it priority as the fundamental quantity that is maximized. Fitness is just a way of talking about the survival of replicators, in this case genetic replicators." (R. Dawkins, page 110, The Extended Phenotype (1982))

• "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science." (Charles Darwin, page 146, The Origin of Species)

• "Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle." (Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming).

• "Glaubt es mir, wenn die Menschen in der wissenschaftlichen Fabrik arbeiten und nutzbar werden sollen bevor sie reif sind, so ist in kurzem die Wissenschaft eben so ruiniert wie die allzuzeitig in dieser Fabrik verwendeten Sklaven." (Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historia für das Leben, 1874)

• Three web sites for sources of information used by Craig Unger, in research for his book House of Bush, House of Saud: Historycommons, National Archive, FAS.