Best Mendel Quotes & Sayings

Not that he [Uzbek] rejected Mendel's proposals or rebelled against his decisions; but he exercised a subtle, passive abrasion against every active thrust: like dust in a watch, Mendel thought to himself. He's got dust in him, even though he is young. It's stupid to say the young are strong. You understand many things better at thirty than at twenty and you can also bear them better. — Primo Levi

Although no explanation can be expected to be satisfactory, it remains a possibility among others that Mendel was deceived by some assistant who knew too well what was expected. This possibility is supported by independent evidence that the data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel's expectations. — Ronald Fisher

Just as an astronomer, alone in an observatory, watches night after night through a telescope the myriads of stars, their mysterious movements, their changeful medley, their extinction and their flaming-up anew, so did Jacob Mendel, seated at his table in the Cafe Gluck, look through his spectacles into the universe of books, a universe that lies above the world of our everyday life, and, like the stellar universe, is full of changing cycles. — Stefan Zweig

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it. — Jean Rostand

The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers. Haldane, Wright, and Fisher are the pioneers of population genetics whose main research equipment was paper and ink rather than microscopes, experimental fields, Drosophila bottles, or mouse cages. Theirs is theoretical biology at its best, and it has provided a guiding light for rigorous quantitative experimentation and observation. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel's laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type. — Julius Evola

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up to the 'ancestral law'. What we fought against was the slovenliness in applying Mendel's categories and asserting that such formulae apply in cases when they did not. — Karl Pearson

But Gedalah had something in mind. He sent four men to collect a dozen pumpkins, and he had them set in the pylons that supported the overhead power line that ran the train, one pumpkin to each pylon.
"What are they for?" Mendel asked.
"Nothing," Gedaleh said. "They're there to make the Germans wonder why they're there. We've wasted maybe two minutes; they're methodical, they'll waste a lot more. — Primo Levi

Once more, he was immersing himself in books, reaching the end of long articles, even going back over paragraphs to make sure he'd grasped things. How much more satisfying it was than all that skimming, all that jumping around. At present, he was working his way, deliciously, through a book on Mendel, the father of genetics. A man who might not have spend seven years watching peas, if he'd had the internet. — Julie Highmore

Hinde Esther Singer was born in Poland on March 31, 1881, the daughter of Bathsheva and Pinchos Mendel Singer. Bathsheva was an intellectual, but both Bathsheva's father and her husband disapproved of erudite women. — Clive Sinclair

It was not noisy prejudice that caused the work of Mendel to lie dead for thirty years, but the sheer inability of contemporary opinion to distinguish between a new idea and nonsense. — Wilfred Trotter

Josh Mendel has a secret.
Unfortunately, everyone knows what it is. — Barry Lyga

We were also born," Line said abruptly. Mendel questioned her with a look, and Line tried to clarify her thought: "Born, expelled. Russia conceived us, nourished us, made us grow in her darkness, as in a womb; then she had labor pains, contractions, and threw us out; and now here we are, naked and new, like babies just born. Isn't it the same for you?"
"Narische meidele, vos darst do freden?" Mendel rebutted, feeling on his lips and affectionate smile and a light veil over his eyes. — Primo Levi

The simple recipe for success that Mendel had instilled in his children from the cradle on consisted in never complaining, never asking for anything, striving to be the best in everything you do, and never trusting anyone. — Isabel Allende

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? — Barry Lopez

There was a pause. Mendel said: 'It's the devil you don't know that gets you. — John Le Carre