John B. S. Haldane Quotes

Money can buy a fine dog but it is kindness that makes him wag his tail.

Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.

This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.

Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.

Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.

Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination.

There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.

Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.

If human beings could be propagated by cutting, like apple trees, aristocracy would be biologically sound.

Until politics are a branch of science, we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

There can be no truce between science and religion.

A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.

And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.

I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size.

A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.

It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.

There are 400,000 species of beetles on this planet, but only 8,000 species of mammals.

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

You can analyze a glass of water and you're left with a lot of chemical components, but nothing you can drink.

The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder

I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.

Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.

The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern.

I will jump into the river to save two brothers or eight cousins.

I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.

I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.

An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.

The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".

So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science.

Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.

I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.