John Dryden Quotes

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it.

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

A nation may be in a tumult to-day for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago.

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?

Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.

But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.

For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so.

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural.

The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.

Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

What sort of god would deliberately create a world in which his creatures must eat one another to live?

I suppose that every age has its own particular fantasy: ours is science. A seventeenth-century man like Blaise Pascal, who thought himself a mathematician and scientist of genius, found it quite ridiculous that anyone should suppose that rational processes could lead to any ultimate conclusions about life, but easily accepted the authority of the Scriptures. With us, it is the other way 'round

Religion and science, then, in my analysis are the two great sister forces which have pulled, and are still pulling, mankind onward and upward.

The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.

All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again.

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, culture corrects the theory of success.

The history of empires is the record of human misery; the history of the sciences is that of the greatness and happiness of mankind.

We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if He had taken a poll in the land of Israel? Where would the Reformation have gone if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn't polls or public opinion alone of the moment that counts.

Before World War II in Canada, you were nobody until you went to England. Then, after that it was you're nobody until you went to the States.

I think one big reason why Sweden might have a good reputation around the world is that if you look at Norway or Denmark or Finland, any of the Scandinavian countries, they all seem less interested in being a part of the larger world, where Sweden has always tried to reach out, whether it's with Volvos, Saabs, H&Ms, music, clothes.

A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry.

You can kill that man but not his song, When it's sung the whole world round...