[Harry Nelson]
It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. or: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.
William of Occam
Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.
Ernest Rutherford
One day, Sir, you may tax it.
Faraday, in response to British Prime Minister Gladstone's question, `What good is electricity?'.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard P. Feynman
There is no higher or lower knowledge, but one only, flowing out of experimentation.
Leonardo da Vinci
What I would do is turn off the machine, pull out the rod real fast, and put my eye up to the hole as fast as I could, so I could see---nothing. The vacuum. Before the air rushed in.
Robert Rathbun Wilson, describing his experiments to `see' the vacuum inside an early Berkeley cyclotron. Often, he got a black eye.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.
Eric Hoffer
In an examination those who do not wish to know ask questions of those who cannot tell.
Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862.
Fondly do we hope--fervently to we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ``the judgements of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether''
Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address March 4, 1865
[Harry Nelson]
hnn@charm.physics.ucsb.edu, 3/12/97