Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 2000, p. 147.
He not only lasted 6 months but he became the most powerful man in the government next to the President, yet he was brutally candid to all including the President. Harry Hopkins was the special assistant to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt through the two great American crises, the Great Depression and World War II. Although he was a social worker with not a shred of political experience, Hopkins was originally selected by the President to operate the national relief program in the midst of the Great Depression. Soon he had spent more money than any human being in history without a taint of scandal. He had never been elected nor was he even ratified by the Senate. He also paid virtually no attention to members of Congress as he became the most successful manager in American Government history. Soon he became FDR’s most important aide. Then he and his wife actually moved into the White House and lived there with the Roosevelts and was a favorite of not only FDR but Eleanor Roosevelt as well.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
