Richard Lewontin Quotes

Actors, politicians, and writers-all of us are but creatures of the hour. Long-lasting fame comes to but few.

If scientists can't communicate with the public, with policy makers, with one another, the future is going to be held back. We're not going to have the future that we could have.

The year you win an Oscar is the fastest year in a Hollywood actor's life. Twelve months later they ask, 'Who won the Oscar last year?'

If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can't realistically go unnoticed.

When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the 'National Geographic' covers a project, it communicates about plants and fish and underwater technology to more than 10 million people.

Do you think I'm going to be one of those flash-in-the-pan actresses?

I'm very, very happy with my recognition/lack of recognition in England in terms of my life. In terms of household name-age. The public's memory is very short, luckily.

I mean, why am I considered an 'it girl?' Because I'm in a lot of movies right now or am on the covers of magazines? I just hope there is something solid behind that. Because here's the thing with 'it girl' status. It's great and amazing that anybody is saying that at all. But how long does that last?

The movies people don't talk about or remember after six months' time don't really matter.

A lot of these reality-TV shows people go on, they come off, and nothing happens. You never hear from them again. Fifteen seconds of fame is not the name of the game. No matter how big you break, or how many people you break in front of, you still have to slowly build a fan base to have anything loyal and lasting from people.

As long as we continue to invest in good content that increases excitement about and understanding of science, we're on the right side of this fight, and I have no problem at all stealing from the toolbox of the clickbaiters.

Sometimes I'll have a brief window of mini-fame thanks to 'Access Hollywood.' But it only lasts a couple of days, and then no one recognizes me anymore.

On any morning these days whole segments of the population wake up to find themselves famous, while, to keep matters shipshape, whole contingents of celebrities wake up to find themselves forgotten.

[The Royal Society] is quite simply the voice of science in Britain. It is intellectually rigorous, not afraid to be outspoken on controversial issues such as climate change, but it is not aggressively secular either, insisting on a single view of the world. In fact, there are plenty of eminent scientists - Robert Winston, for instance - who are also men of faith.

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.

We have to tell the American public that they're missing the boat, that they have to get into writing and reading. Not only that, but books won't crash in the year 2000.

I put a lot of effort into writing 'A Briefer History' at a time when I was critically ill with pneumonia because I think that it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.

Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention. It is not difficult to obtain readers, when we discuss a question which every one is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly, and has divided the nation into parties; or when we display the faults or virtues of him whose public conduct has made almost every man his enemy or his friend.

My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

I keep reading about people who want to be famous - it's not that they want to be great songwriters or great actors, they want to be celebrities. That is scary because you can be famous doing some really stupid things.

I'm not reading currently because I'm getting revisions of a novel. If I read while I'm writing I will unconsciously plagiarize and go to jail.