Mary Roach Quotes

The Wellcome Foundation offered me the chance to establish a small academic research unit, modestly funded, but with total independence. The real opportunity, however, came from King's College, London.

I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.

You frighten a lot of scientists. If they say that climate is not changing, they lose their research grants. And some people cannot afford that; they become silent, or a few of us speak up, because we think that it's for the honesty of science, that we have to do it.

Kinsey would identify himself with Galileo in moments of feelings of persecution.

The tension between public and private science is powerful.

Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.

After World War II, scientific research in the U.S. was well supported. In the 1960s, when I came to America, the sky was the limit, and this conducive atmosphere enabled many of us to pursue esoteric research that resulted in America winning the lion's share of Nobel Prizes.

If we are going to have to worry all the time that we might offend some students' sensibilities, we are not going to be able to teach in a way that actually matters. We're not going to be able to teach about sex, gender, race, religion, or violence.

Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.

The political control of truth quite naturally calls up Orwellian impressions, but in fact the manipulation of knowledge goes deeper than censorship and is more subtle than outright propaganda. It can include conditions under which research will be funded and given a forum, and also the designation of legitimacy to be conferred or withheld in specific fields of inquiry. Jobs, tenure, professional advancement, all can come to depend on taking the approved line. Along with these comes the adjacent phenomenon of the "institute" and "think tank," in most cases with official backing of one sort or another. And then too, there is the way universities pressure their faculties to bring in big money by securing government projects. What all this scrambling means is that in the struggle of memory against forgetting we must compete with official versions and special interests, with public and private demands for serviceable knowledge, with the kinds of on-line information geared to short-term needs. Amid this din the scholar’s independent voice is hard to hear.

The objections to the purchase are generally its extent, the cost of the purchase, the nature of selection, embracing too many works in foreign languages, some of too philosophical a character, and some otherwise objectionable. Of the first description, exception was taken to Voltaire’s works, &, co., and of the other to Callender’s Prospect Before Us

There are so few drugs for these killer diseases, but for erectile dysfunction, we have had 14 drugs since 1996… It says something about where the priorities of the pharmaceutical companies seem to lie.

The standard of what offends 'the common conscience of the community' conflicts ... with the command of the First Amendment. ... Certainly that standard would not be an acceptable one if religion, economics, politics or philosophy were involved. How does it become a constitutional standard when literature treating with sex is concerned? Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to 'sexual impurity' or has a tendency to 'excite lustful thoughts.' This is community censorship in one of its worst forms...

One of our main objectives is to restore meritocracy within research and academia, where cronyism is also widespread. We also want to give money back to public research that is dying.

The mere fact that my comments have caused such strong protests, although I'm not a European, and also the fact that I have been compared with certain persons in German history indicates how charged with conflict the atmosphere for research is in your country. Here in Iran you needn't worry.

I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.

If I understand correctly, part of the objection to homosexuality used to have to do with the fact that gay people didn't reproduce. Part of it seems to have to do, as a lot of Christian resistance to gayness does, with a dim view of sex that is not procreative, and that is therefore lascivious.

We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

Today most funding for science comes through government. That means that you have to be known to be sympathetic to conclusions that are acceptable to the political classes.

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

I'm not against gay people... I have a relative who is also gay. We can't help it if they were born that way. What I'm critical off are actions that violate the word of God.

... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?

I guess you go for nothing, if you really want to go that far.

I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important.