Jonathan Miller Quotes

I was always fascinated with science, and being Persian, it's instilled in us at a young age to follow something very academic in our career.

Certainly by the time I was in seventh grade, I knew I had to have a long education if I wanted to become an astronomer, but I figured I'd try it, and if I didn't get far enough, I could always end up teaching in high school or math or physics.

I can't think of any relatives that ever went into science.

I have generally sought to work on questions that I thought were both interesting and approachable, yet not too widely appreciated. To struggle to make discoveries that would be made by others a short time later seems futile to me.

For a long time I thought I should be a civil engineer. That seemed to be the only thing worth doing, and I chose the wrong subjects at A-level. I read all the sciences to start with, and then had to admit, 'This isn't what I want to do' and changed course.

By the time I could have played football, I was already into acting and that's what I wanted to do.

My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine, so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.

There was little in my early life to indicate that an interest in biology would become the passion of my academic career. In fact, there was little to suggest I would have an academic career.

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.

Speaking for myself, I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.

Medicine, anything academic, is a very Persian Iranian route to take in life, in one's career.

As far as Dustin or Dusty, neither of them contributed to me wanting to be in the industry as far as encouragement. They didn't discourage it, but I think they both were indifferent as far as it had to be my decision.

Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals.

I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.

The sciences, even the best,-mathematics and astronomy,-are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it.

'Science in itself' is nothing, for it exists only in the human beings who are its bearers. 'Science for its own sake' usually means nothing more than science for the sake of the people who happen to be pursuing it.

Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.

In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.

In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.

Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death.

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.

The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand.

I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.