Janusz Korwin-Mikke Quotes

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.

Scientists aren't necessarily good communicators, because they aren't trained to be good communicators.

Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.

The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.

The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

The key to all knowledge comes in words of just one syllable, apparently.... There's only the last page left to write on. I'll fill it with words of just one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

This paper of yours is so lightly written that you must have sweated terribly.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

When you have the goods, you don't need to dress up what you're writing.

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

My mom would always say this thing about writing - and I've taken it into account in a lot of things in my life - which is just, "Make it shorter." Figure out what you are truly saying, whittle it down to the essence, then say that.

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.