John Dalton Quotes

In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.

I think if I hadn't become a sociologist, I would have become very anti-intellectual.

I really wanted to do research. That has never changed.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.

As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn't make me a scientist. So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists.

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.

I love academics, theory and all that. I love and admire that and try to do as much reading as I can.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.

And when I started college, I think I was good at two things: arguing and asking questions.

Once I engage in something, I really engage in it, and I love the process of reading and researching because I come from an academic background.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Research has been called good business, a necessity, a gamble, a game. It is none of these - it's a state of mind.

In the Sanghi family, there is no one who has undertaken intellectual pursuits.

When I was an academic, I'd sometimes get a little feeling of excitement when I had an idea that was, I hoped, fresh. And whether anyone should act on that idea is a very different question.

We live in an age of universal investigation, and of exploration of the sources of all movements.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

I love doing research. It's like cheating, but with permission.

I think it's really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting.

I love meeting people and analysing their world. I like having a puzzle to solve. That's why I do so much work in advance. Even if it doesn't affect my performance in the end, I just find it so much more interesting if I've got as wide as possible an understanding of the material.

I write to relieve an intellectual itch. I stumble across a hitherto neglected set of events, transformations, characters, or source materials from the past, and they nag at me until I make sense of them in words. But I also write to seduce and to make my readers think.

I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.