Some quotations

• "It’s more than beauty that I feel in music – that I think musicians feel in music. What we know we feel we'd like to convey to the listener. ... But, overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me – it’s just another way of saying that this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician's is through his music." Statements of John Coltrane in interview with Don DeMichael (editor of Down Beat Magazine 1961-67), from page 152 of book, Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews edited by Chris DeVito.
• "John Coltrane's sound rearranges molecular structure." Statement of Carlos Santana in Chasing Trane - the John Coltrane documentary directed by John Scheinfeld.
• "When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, one of two things will happen; there will be a ledge for you to stand on, or you will be taught to fly!" ~Unknown Author~
• In a letter of Leibiz to Fontenelle dated Jan 6, 1703: "Man muss sich dem Publikumsgeschmack anpassen, der jede Abhandlung nach ihrem handgreiflichen Nutzen betwertet." -- sounds familiar? Indeed, the first version of a manuscript Leibniz submitted to the French Academy, in which binary notation for integers is first described, was rejected on the grounds that there was no obvious application or utility of the binary notation. Leibniz modified the text by adding a theological discussion of zero and one (1 corresponding to perfection or God), whereby the fact that all integers could be written in binary notation was similar to the fact that all of creation emerged from only two concepts: perfection and emptiness. Fortunately for the sake of digital computers, the modified text was subsequently accepted. (At the time, Leibniz believed that he was the first to have discovered binary notation; though not well known at the time, binary notation had already been discovered.) Quotation taken from the excellent biography, Der berühmte Herr Leibniz by Eike Christian Hirsch.
• "Ein Stück des Lebens ist verloren, sobald eine Stunde vergeudet wird", life motto of Leibniz.
• "Die Natur verstümme auf der Folter der Apparate", quote from Goethe, reacting to Newton's successful mathematical physics (especially Newton's optics, where Goethe strove to retain a 'balance' between the objective and subjective worlds). Goethe also believed that applied mathematics decomposed everything (analysis) without building connections (synthesis), i.e. in Goethe's words, "die angewandte Mathematik zerlegt alles und verbindet nichts". However, since the death of Newton (1643-1727) and of Goethe (1749-1832), experimental and theoretical physics has triumphed beyond our wildest expectations, hence Goethe's viewpoint is either the opinion of a math-averse literary genius or the kernel of a visionary concerned with the loss of the soul in our technological society.
• The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it. - Epicurus. See also this.
• "... (Music) should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It's easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That's the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that's universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it... enrichment, that's the function of music." (Bill Evans, jazz piano giant)
• "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)

• Humanism and Its Aspirations (subtitled Humanist Manifesto III), signed by 22 Nobel laureates, including Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (Nobel physics 1991). From Wikipedia:

  • Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis. (See empiricism.)
  • Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change.
  • Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. (See ethical naturalism.)
  • Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals.
  • Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships.
  • Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.

• 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.