Ambrose Bierce Quotes

We fail in even the simplest of all scientific observations-nobody looks up anymore.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn’t have known.

Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.

O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any sceptre!

For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.

One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme.

I also learned to play Fruit Ninja on an iPad. It is quite hypnotic, and I hope one day to get past 100 points. I remembered that David Cameron admits to being an addict. I wonder if it helps him in his work. 'Great, just destroyed a pineapple! Reminds me, shall we send those grenades to the Syrian rebels?'

If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.

I have a fine lot of telescopes. I have one with which I can see the Mountains in the Moon.

I don't like telephones.

What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

The only reason Hubble works is because we have a space shuttle.

Phones are interesting objects. Sometimes you wish they just didn't exist.

I love a cool cellphone as much as the next guy, but, god, I hate when it rings.

I'm so tired of cell phones.

It's so astounding the amount of sacrifice the astronauts have to go through to do what they do and all the science involved in space exploration.

I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.

Great telescopes like the Kecks allow us to explore the River of Time back toward its source.

Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard?...I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He'd say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.