Laughlin Quotes & Sayings

At Berkeley I had my first encounter with real professional scientists. — Robert B. Laughlin

She'll tell you this house is haunted, but I believe the truth of the matter is that people get haunted. Not places.' - Will Laughlin — Brandy Heineman

I have approached the buildings as psychological and poetic manifestations - rather than from the more technical viewpoints of the architect and historian (which mostly miss the living spirit behind the forms). — Clarence John Laughlin

The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably. — James Laughlin

As a whole, I am interested in the symbolic, rather than the literal use of the camera. — Clarence John Laughlin

In the evening, the tarantella dancers will come to the hotel; perhaps they'll dance and sing in the courtyard that is dripping with wistaria blooms and pungent with citrus perfumes.
They wear gay costumes, these who sing and dance for us to keep alive the romance of other days; and they are full of that joy in living which seems the gift of these siren shores. — Clara E. Laughlin

The mystery of light [and] the enigma of time form the twin pivots around which all my work revolves. In addition ... my work attempts to create a mythology for our contemporary world. — Clarence John Laughlin

In old grimy streets, in isolated and decaying houses, sometimes far from the Vieux Carre, in little used and secluded cemeteries, there still sluggishly circulates the ebbing blood of the past, of a vigorous and vividly hued past. — Clarence John Laughlin

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great. — James Laughlin

One of my basic feelings is that the mind, and the heart alike, of the photographer must be dedicated to the glory, the magic, and the mystery of light. The mystery of time, the magic of light, the enigma of reality - and their interrelationships - are my constant themes and preoccupations. — Clarence John Laughlin

Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas. — Robert B. Laughlin

It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] ... — Robert B. Laughlin

We see them when they come to New York. They stay at my wife's apartment. We have quite a correspondence with them at all times. They play a very important role, the authors in the firm, because so much of the material we publish is suggested by them. — James Laughlin

It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do. — Robert B. Laughlin

Let us see as steadily and completely as possible the realities of our age: the wasted lives, the scattered and misused resources (human and material), the steel magic of the misdirected machinery, the mad clockwork tragedy of it all. — Clarence John Laughlin

Altogether at least sixty thousand people were sterilized because of Laughlin's efforts. At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today. — Bill Bryson

My mother, who was professional schoolteacher, was particularly concerned about our formal education and even went so far as to start a private school together with some other parents so that our intellectual needs would be met. — Robert B. Laughlin

Faced with our imminent extinction, Tom Laughlin believes, all assumptions are called into question. — Steven Pressfield

It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself. — Clarence John Laughlin

There is nothing, under present conditions, that can be more easily and exactly reproduced than a technically good black-and-white photograph, and it is utter rot to burden those interested in them with irrelevant biographical trivia and pet longwinded theory. — Clarence John Laughlin

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence. — James Laughlin

My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing. — Robert B. Laughlin

The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life. — Robert B. Laughlin

Photography is one of the most authentic and integral modes of expression possible in this world in which we live. — Clarence John Laughlin

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot. — James Laughlin

In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day. — Robert B. Laughlin

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention. — James Laughlin

The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. — Robert B. Laughlin

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it. — James Laughlin

I'm gonna do between 75 and 100 dates. A lot of it will be in Laughlin, Nevada; I'll be there for two weeks. And I'll work some casinos here and there, and the fair dates. — Mel Tillis

I didn't realize. I wasn't trying to rewrite history.

You couldn't if you wanted to. It already happened. It don't matter if anyone remembers it or not. He paused. Abbs, you're tryin' to find hope in the past, but the world and its lusts are passing away. Hope belongs to the future. -Abby Wells and Will Laughlin — Brandy Heineman

To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed. — Robert B. Laughlin

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors. — James Laughlin

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important. — James Laughlin

My job at Stanford is rather different from the ones I had held previously in that my own ambitions must take a back seat to the well-being of the students with whom I work. — Robert B. Laughlin

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago. — James Laughlin

One of the terrific aspects of MIT in those days was the enormous variety of experimental work that either took place there or was talked about in seminars by outside speakers aggressively recruited by the faculty. — Robert B. Laughlin

In our society, most of us wear protective masks of various kinds and for various reasons. Very often the end result is that the masks grow to us, displacing our original characters with our assumed characters. — Clarence John Laughlin

I don't know how many years it was before I arrived at a formulated philosophy that the happiest thing to do, always, when visiting an individual or a country, is to admit, by word or manner, how much I'm finding there that my life had lacked hitherto — Clara E. Laughlin

Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself - Climate is beyond our power to control ... Earth doesn't care about governments or their legislation. You can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself. — Robert B. Laughlin

I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage. — James Laughlin

I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs. — Robert B. Laughlin

I was an extremely reclusive and introverted boy. — Robert B. Laughlin

It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists. — Robert B. Laughlin

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going. — James Laughlin

I work with many jazz artists as Miles Davis, Laughlin, etc.. One of the things all these artists had in common is that they had no fear. — George Duke

Dissatisfaction with one's self and dissatisfaction with the world - is necessary - it is one of the prime things that keeps the artist going on - that drives him - happiness, as such, must come in between times, as best it can. — Clarence John Laughlin

There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small. — James Laughlin

Some that read this book will find its Libertarian and Constitutionalist slant a bit obtuse and maybe even off-putting. This author makes no apologies for viewing the history of the eugenics movement from this political perspective. It is the ethical and legal underpinnings of the American Revolution that remain as a guiding light while the eugenics movement continues to reemerge long after its alleged demise. Limited, or rather minimal government, goes a long way to curtail the disconnect that emerges when government grows so large that it no longer feels compelled to heed to the dictates of the governed. — A.E. Samaan

It is an interesting fact that during my tour I was never allowed access to computers, radios, or anything else that I might damage through curiosity, or perhaps something more sinister. — Robert B. Laughlin

When I moved to Stanford I began to pursue the line of research I have been following ever since, namely trying to understand the larger implications of fractional quantum hall discovery. — Robert B. Laughlin

Another important aspect of our home was respect for ideas. — Robert B. Laughlin

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said. — James Laughlin

The error in this conclusion may be most simply demonstrated by means of an actual example. Let us select for this purpose the monetary history of Austria, which Laughlin also uses as an illustration. From 1859 onwards the Austrian National Bank was released from the obligation to convert its notes on demand into silver, and nobody could tell when the State paper-money issued in 1866 would be redeemed, or even if it would be redeemed at all. It was not until the later 'nineties that the transition to metallic money was completed by the actual resumption of cash payments on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Bank. — Ludwig Von Mises

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry. — James Laughlin

I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra. — James Laughlin

Over the course of time this gave us a deep respect for ideas, both our own and those of others, and an understanding that conflict through debate is a powerful means of revealing truth. — Robert B. Laughlin

The great glory of travel, to me, is not just what I see that's new to me in countries visited, but that in almost every one of them I change from an outsider looking in to an insider looking out. — Clara E. Laughlin

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian. — James Laughlin

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets. — James Laughlin

As a consequence while we had a roof over our heads, food on the table, and clothes to wear to school we were constantly conscious of being of modest means. — Robert B. Laughlin

Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination. — Clarence John Laughlin

Development," mind you - not just "advancement." For Foch is, and ever has been, the kind of man who would most abhor being advanced faster than he developed. He would infinitely rather be prepared for a promotion and fail to get it than get a promotion for which he was not thoroughly prepared. Nor is he the sort of individual who can comfortably deceive himself about his fitness. He sustains himself by no illusions of the variety: "If I had so-and-so to do, I'd probably get through as well as nine-tenths — Clara E. Laughlin

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends. — James Laughlin

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers can hear the sounds. — James Laughlin

So mothers everywhere take heart. The indoctrination you administer now may have unanticipated positive effects years later. — Robert B. Laughlin

But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates. — Robert B. Laughlin

A person obsessed with ultimate truth is a person asking to be relieved of money. — Robert B. Laughlin

Though your steps may falter
persevere with the climb,
You will achieve the summit
at the appropriate time. — Patricia D'Arcy Laughlin

We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good. — James Laughlin

My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields. — Robert B. Laughlin

Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of. — James Laughlin