Quotes

Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we shall have learned nothing from our 2,000 years of suffering and will deserve our fate.

Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice.

I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will , not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming-house, than a physicist.

To-day in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire , the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!

According to the assumption considered here, in the propagation of a light ray emitted from a point source, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing volumes of space, but consists of a finite number of energy quanta localized at points of space that move without dividing and can be absorbed or generated only as complete units.

I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.

You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

[ Suggesting “hello” as a standard telephone greeting :] I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties

I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.

Here comes the story of the Hurricane,

If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes

Mama, take this badge off of me

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,

Don’t follow leaders

You don’t need a weather man

Once upon a time you dressed so fine

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,

Something is happening here

Come senators, congressmen

The order is

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,

How many times can a man turn his head,

Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it.

How many deaths will it take till he knows

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien .

Sundered by peaks unscalable,

I am about to scream madly in the office,

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by fate,

The nation is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain.

Besides, on general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

I play the game for the game’s own sake.

You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth to which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

[ Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson :] The fair sex is your department.

Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.

Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!

Like all Holmes’s reasoning the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained.

Then we rushed on into the captain’s cabin . . . and there he lay . . . while the chaplain stood, with a smoking pistol in his hand.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

“Excellent,” I cried. “Elementary,” said he.

He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.

I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with the case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution.

Your conversation is most entertaining. When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.