Simple and wrong

Submitted by cvining on

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

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Citation

1920, Prejudices: Second Series by H. L. Mencken (Henry Louis Mencken), Chapter 4: The Divine Afflatus, Start Page 155, Borzoi: Alfred A. Knopf, New York.(but often attributed to othere as well)

One Funeral At A Time

Submitted by cvining on

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

[Often paraphrased as "Science progresses one funeral at a time".]

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Citation

Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. New York: Philosophical library, 1950, p. 33, 97

Crazy enough?

Submitted by cvining on

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

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Said to Wolfgang Pauli after his presentation of Heisenberg's and Pauli's nonlinear field theory of elementary particles, at Columbia University (1958), as reported by F. J. Dyson in his paper "Innovation in Physics"

Heartless attack

Submitted by cvining on

You have to have a heart to have an attack

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Said of Peter Sellers who suffered 8 heart attacks when he inhaled amyl nitrites (poppers) as a sexual stimulant