David Gross Quotes

The development of physics, like the development of any science, is a continuous one.

I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

The whole structure of science gradually grows, but only as it is built upon a firm foundation of past research.

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

New questions can produce new scientific leaps. They can tiddlywink new flips of insight and understanding. Big ones. Paradigm shifts.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.

People are very resentful of elements in the history text books that are different from the history textbooks that they studied…. New knowledge has to be incorporated.

People are always using the past for political purposes…. If they do, they should at least do their homework. l

Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table.

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong.

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

You couldn't always trust the history books. They told a diluted truth, a truth by committee.

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Patriotism ruins history.

The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.