John Burdon Sanderson Haldane Quotes

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of winds, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element.

It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of fight them.

A miracle is something unexpected which we do not understand. A hundred years ago, the jumbo jet would have been a miracle.

More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones, more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from the earth and opened the skies.

Space is where great scientific and commercial breakthroughs of the future will be made. Space is where we can achieve progress in making our country safer from ballistic missile attack. Space is also where medicines of the future will be made, and where some of our children may make their living.

Science has the potential to solve all kinds of problems, but it depends on what a society wants to accomplish.

It's during wartime that innovations happen.

For my grandmother's generation, the big invention was cake mix; for our moms, it was the microwave, and for me, it's the iPhone. And that's enabled us to do so many different things more efficiently at home.

With modern medicine prolonging life no matter what condition you're in, it seems like we're working towards immortality by science.

My obsession is with technology and how it can improve human life. In my view, what we have seen in the last 300 years is only a trailer.

There is usually a long interval between important scientific discoveries and impact on human health.

The pace at which fundamental discoveries of basic science are being uncovered is accelerating, as is the speed at which medical practice is being transformed by these inventions.

Innovation, especially in America, is continuing at a breakneck pace, even in areas facing substantial political or regulatory headwinds. The advances in health care in particular are breathtaking - so many selfless souls are working to advance science, and this is heartening.

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s Technology

What opposite discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses, one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.

What are the most brilliant of our chymical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals?

So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

We know have the power of God in many ways: the atomic bomb, the ability to create life in a test tube, cloning, artificial intelligence.

Economic progress means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power - all these things clearly represent economic progress.

Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses All bent upon killing, because their "of courses" Are not quite the same.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.