Nobel Laureate Quotes

“We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.”
― Arne Tiselius

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
― Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

“I am one of those who think, like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.”
― Marie Curie

“For the admirable gift of himself, and for the magnificent service he renders humanity, what reward does our society offer the scientist? Have these servants of an idea the necessary means of work? Have they an assured existence, sheltered from care? The example of Pierre Curiee, and of others, shows that they have none of these things; and that more often, before they can secure possible working conditions, they have to exhaust their youth and their powers in daily anxieties. Our society, in which reigns an eager desire for riches and luxury, does not understand the value of science. It does not realize that science is a most precious part of its moral patrimony. Nor does it take sufficient cognizance of the fact that science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering. Neither public powers nor private generosity actually accord to science and to scientists the support and the subsidies indispensable to fully effective work.”
― Marie Curie

“Yo tengo miedo. Tengo miedo de una cosa, de que en nuestra vida el miedo ocupe el lugar del amor.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.”
― Paul A.M. Dirac

“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.

[Recalling in 1936 the discovery of the nucleus in 1909, when some alpha particles were observed instead of travelling through a very thin gold foil were seen to rebound backward, as if striking something much more massive than the particles themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.]”
― Ernest Rutherford

“[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]

Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.”
― James D. Watson

“I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.”
― Edward M. Purcell

“Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.”
― John Galsworthy, Five Speeches to P.E.N. Clubs and a Letter

“Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.”
― Percy Williams Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory

“After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea, during the year 1923, that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalised by extending it to all material particles and notably to electrons.”
― Louis de Broglie

“The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration. When he stops to think, he does recognize, however, that the whole atmosphere of the world in which he lives is tinged by science, as is shown most immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little deeper thinking shows him that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire mental outlook of modern civilised man on the world about him.”
― Percy Williams Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist

“Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of another fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect of a 'vital principle' than the splitting up of cane sugar by invertase. The history of this problem is instructive, as it warns us against considering problems as beyond our reach because they have not yet found their solution.”
― Jacques Loeb

“Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.”
― Thomas Hunt Morgan

“Lo que ha pasado es algo desconocido. Es otro miedo. No se oye, no se ve, no huele, no tiene color; en cambio nosotros cambiamos física y psíquicamente.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“I realized that more and more I was saying, 'It seems to me that we have come to the time war ought to be given up. It no longer makes sense to kill 20 million or 40 million people because of a dispute between two nations who are running things, or decisions made by the people who really are running things. It no longer makes sense. Nobody wins. Nobody benefits from destructive war of this sort and there is all of this human suffering.' And Einstein was saying the same thing of course. So that is when we decided — my wife and I — that first, I was pretty effective as a speaker. Second, I better start boning up, studying these other fields so that nobody could stand up and say, 'Well, the authorities say such and such '.”
― Linus Pauling

“Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.”
― Jean Baptiste Perrin

“I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.

[Comment when told that he had won a Nobel prize, referring to the drug he discovered for the treatment of heart disease.]”
― James Whyte Black

“Alfvén dismissed in his address religion as a 'myth'...”
― Helge Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology

“Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.”
― Francis Perrin, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography

“Hace poco encontraron en el bosque un caballo salvaje. Estaba muerto. En otro lugar, una liebre. No los habían matado, sino que estaban muertos. Y ha cundido el temor. Pero un día se encontraron a un vagabundo muerto y el hecho pasó casi desapercibido. En todas partes la gente se ha acostumbrado a ver personas muertas...”
― Svetlana Alexievich

“Y nuestra única respuesta es el silencio. Cerramos los ojos como niños pequeños y creemos habernos escondido y que el horror no nos encontrará.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Así pues, ¿qué es mejor? ¡Recordar u olvidar?”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“¡Lo fuerte es que se trataba de lugares preciosos! De una hermosura...Y esa misma belleza era la que hacía de aquel horror algo aún mas pavoroso. El hombre debía abandonar aquellos lugares. Huir de allí como un malvado. Como un criminal.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“La caza y la guerra son la principal ocupación del hombre. Desde el principio de los tiempos.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Tšernobylin jälkeen… Lasten piirustusnäyttelyssä haikara astelee mustalla kevätpellolla… Alla lukee: ‘Kukaan ei ole kertonut haikaralle.’ Minulla oli samanlaiset tunteet.”
― Svetlana Aleksijevitš, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“রবিঠাকুর যখন “ভেঙে মোর ঘরের ‘তালা’ নিয়ে যাবি কে আমারে” না লিখে “ভেঙে মোর ঘরের ‘চাবি’ নিয়ে যাবি কে আমারে” লিখেন, তখন সেটা মোটেও বেমানান লাগে না কারণ তিনি বিশ্বকবি রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“My name is Watanabe Eriko. I'm an upcoming Nobel Prize laureate, and reality is my bitch.”
― sun tzu OM, Saga of Soul

“By my final years at primary school I had realised that literature was more than just an ordinary pleasure. I could tell that reading opened entirely different worlds before me...”
― Olga Tokarczuk