Science And Change Quotes & Sayings

I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way ... why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do - and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view. — Nathaniel J. Wyeth

But science and experience reveal that with self-reflection and understanding, non-ideal patterns we've adopted from our own pasts can be transformed. Be patient with yourself and with your family members. With kindness and understanding, to yourself and to others, change can be nurtured and good things can emerge. — Daniel J. Siegel

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems. — Paul Gibbons

I don't believe that the science is settled on man-made climate change. And so - while I live in Colorado - you see where I live. I love the environment. And - and I want to make sure we do everything we can to protect the environment. I don't want government to put artificial standards on us. — Ken Buck

The stories leaders and others tell, few of which are true, are a lousy foundation on which to base any sort of science, and we know how to accomplish behavioral change and the importance of priming, informational saliency, and social networks. Producing inspiration and other good feelings doesn't last very long. — Jeffrey Pfeffer

The paleontological evidence before us today clearly demonstrates ordered progressive change with the successive development of new faunal and floral assemblages through the changing epochs of our earth's history. There should be no real conflict between science, which is the search for truth, and Christ's teachings, which I hold to be truth itself. It is only when scientists remove God from creation that the Christian is faced with an irreconcilable situation. — Wendell Phillips

Drug companies do not want us to dream this dream. But many people who are ill reject it as well. The responsibility of being your own cure is too much. Historically, people have been willing to subject themselves to the most poisonous of treatments rather than change themselves. In other words, meditation is hard, but pills are easy, and they feel reassuringly more like science. — Magnus Flyte

[To the cultures of Asia and the continent of Africa] it is the Western impact which has stirred up the winds of change and set the processes of modernization in motion. Education brought not only the idea of equality but also another belief which we used to take for granted in the West-the idea of progress, the idea that science and technology can be used to better human conditions. In ancient society, men tended to believe themselves fortunate if tomorrow was not worse than today and anyway, there was little they could do about it. — Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are predicted by science. — Henry Thomas Buckle

Any objective look at what science has to say about climate change ought to be sufficient to persuade reasonable people that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible for a substantial part of that - and that these changes are doing harm and will continue to do more harm unless we start to reduce our emissions. — John Holdren

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management. — Paul Gibbons

Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it. — Tom Shippey

I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I'm supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I'm praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things. — Mother Teresa

Climate change: I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat and we know that the time for action is now — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks. — Paul Gibbons

We should stop the non-scientific, pseudo-scientific, and anti-scientific nonsense emanating from the right wing, and start demanding immediate action to reduce global warming and prevent catastrophic climate change that may be on our horizon now. We must not let the [Bush] Administration distort science and rewrite and manipulate scientific reports in other areas. We must not let it turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Pollution Agency. — Edward Kennedy

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. — Richard Dawkins

So far I have been speaking of theoretical science, which is an attempt to understand the world. Practical science, which is an attempt to change the world, has been important from the first, and has continually increased in importance, until it has almost ousted theoretical science from men's thoughts. — Bertrand Russell

A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality — Friedrich Engels

Even thought you can't see it, my son, things are changing. Things ALWAYS change, given enough time and pressure. The very thought of that is scary to some, but change is absolutely nothing to be afraid of. It is a simple fact of life. — EXO Books

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. — K. Lee Lerner

There was an old belief that in the embers
Of all things their primordial form exists,
And cunning alchemists
Could re-create the rose with all its members
From its own ashes, but without the bloom,
Without the lost perfume
Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science
Can from the ashes in our hearts once more
The rose of youth restore?
What craft of alchemy can bid defiance
To time and change, and for a single hour
Renew this phantom-flower? — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is so irresponsible for people in the 'I want to change the course of my society' community to not do the damn research into figuring out the latest science of how people change their minds, and under what conditions people change their minds, and what exactly in their minds is being changed.

The belief systems people hold are absolutely, in no way, shape, or form the result of any objective evaluation of information. The prejudices are inherited, they're socially inflicted, they're propagandized in school, in church, in communities, in families. They are reinforced by endless bouts of patriotic media and all of this nonsense. People are an emotional Gordian knot kaleidoscopic clusterfrack of prior prejudices stuffed into their heads and held aloft by the spears of social approval and ostracism. — Stefan Molyneux

Remember how quickly our field [computer science] changes. That's why you want to focus on learning things that don't change: how to work well with other people, how to carefully assess a client's real - as opposed to perceived - needs, and things like that. — Randy Pausch

Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. — John Dewey

Science, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, is flexible and nondogmatic. It sticks to facts and to reality (which always can change) and to logical thinking (which does not contradict itself and hold two opposite views at the same time). But it also avoids rigid all-or-none and either/or thinking and sees that reality is often two sided and includes contradictory events and characteristics. Thus, in my relations with you, I am not a totally good person or a bad person but a person who sometimes treats you well and sometimes treats you badly. Instead of viewing world events in a rigid, absolute way, science assumes that such events, and especially human affairs, usually follow the laws of probability. — Albert Ellis

I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don't tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards. When I was younger, those kinds of comments bothered me, but eventually got to a point where I realized I wasn't going to change who I was. — Aisha Tyler

There are a lot of reasons people don't talk about climate change. One of them has to do with the language of science, and people feeling not competent about this issue. — Margaret D. Klein

Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so. — E. O. Wilson

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect. — Richard Dawkins

The Dalai Lama once said that 'If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change!' This is a great thought! And great thoughts belong to great men only! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence. — Paul Gibbons

History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical. — Marc Bloch

And how will this come to pass?' He paused and lowered his voice. ' In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear, And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

There is a stability in the Universe because of the orderly and balanced process of change, the same measure coming out as going in, as if reality were a huge fire that inhaled and exhaled equal amounts. — Heraclitus

The screech of tyres, an almighty bang and a car exploded through the playground wall like a high-velocity bullet through a watermelon. — Kev Heritage

A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth's atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth's external crust, and finally of the origin and development of living organisms. These considerations naturally divide the physics of the earth into three essential parts, the first being a theory of the atmosphere, or Meteorology, the second, a theory of the earth's external crust, or Hydrogeology, and the third, a theory of living organisms, or Biology. — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. — Thomas Jefferson

Science is actually, I think, a very creative venture. It requires thinking outside of the box. It requires an ability to be open to new experiences and an ability to change course in the middle, try a different path, or go about things in a new way. — Cara Santa Maria

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste — Paul Gibbons

The goal of science is to understand the fundamental reality and the goal of technology is to change that reality. — Kedar Joshi

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program. — Paul Gibbons

Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another.
Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with?
And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims. — Isaac Asimov

The conference also has a moral duty to examine the corruption of science that can be caused by massive amounts of money. The United States has disbursed tens of billions of dollars to climate scientists who would not have received those funds had their research shown climate change to be beneficial or even modest in its effects. Are these scientists being tempted by money? And are the very, very few climate scientists whose research is supported by industry somehow less virtuous? — Patrick Michaels

At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth. — John Charles Polanyi

But science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation. — Arthur Balfour

Science is one , gods are many
science allows change and accept new tested things but religion not
science laws are same all over earth but religions have different — Er.teji

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. — Carl Sagan

If you don't like the solution, change the problem. — Criss Jami

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change. — H.G.Wells

The United States is in the midst of many spirited political debates about national priorities and public spending ... However, we have found that science is an area where both political parties can find common ground, and in which political change does not necessarily create discontinuities. — John Gibbons

The U.S. ranks 25th in math and 21st in science. We are woefully behind. The only way to change this situation is through public-private partnerships. — Klaus Kleinfeld

If only she could jump into the flyer and scurry back across the mountains but she had work to do and a planet to save. — Mary Brock Jones

The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place. — Paul Gibbons

The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
This is:
Change.
Read it through again and you'll get it. — Douglas Adams

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid. — Ursula K. Le Guin

[The Center for Science in the Public Interest forced] PepsiCo to change the labeling of its Tropicana Peach Papaya Juice to reflect ... that it has neither peaches nor papaya and is not a juice. — Michael Moss

One might be tempted to think that the many slights and rejections we scientists must suffer are somehow a necessary part of our education. But I don't think that way anymore. My experience with the music business has taught me to cherish every bit of feedback I can get, and not to think of the hundreds of unreturned phone calls or ignored pitches I must face as signs of personal failings. It was this change of perspective,
and the pressure it removed from my life, that first made me want to try systematically applying what I learned in the music business to the world of science. — Marc J. Kuchner

They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific ... We've had four hundred years of modern science, and we ought to know by now what it's good for, and what it's not good for. It's time for a change. — Michael Crichton

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world. — Paul Gibbons

We would destroy ourselves and the planet if no change happens, because of the amplification of the egoic state through science and technology. — Eckhart Tolle

We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them. — Bill McKibben

Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science, with new, ingenious devices and techniques, can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so. — Henry W. Kendall

The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment. — Paul Gibbons

Leadership must evolve into a "science-based craft", like surgery. — Paul Gibbons

... inside of a year, almost all of the stuff of which you were made got regularly switched out for other stuff, as you ate and drank and breathed, and yet if you said you had the same identity you did a year ago, no one would think to call you a liar. Being is always becoming; people change and stay the same. What is true for bodies is also true for selves: even the most honest person has many faces, none of which is false. — Dexter Palmer

I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I felt like a character in a science fiction story, trapped in someone else's body, articulating someone else's words. To be frank, I bored even myself. And by the time I was thirty-six, my course was set, my die stamped, I knew I would never change. — Philip Palmer

I think it's very important to invite and encourage people to talk about climate change who have a lay understanding. In general, there is a lot of confusion among climate activists about the role of science, that scientists should be social and political leaders of this movement. — Margaret D. Klein

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead. — Harry Harrison

Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted. — Gary Taubes

This is a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science. But I have been persuaded that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the idea of explanation of the intentions of a purposive being who produces the means to his ends by choice. In spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it certainly shouldn't be ruled out a priori. Formally, the possibility of principles of change over time tending toward certain types of outcome is coherent, in a world in which the nonteleological laws are not fully deterministic. — Thomas Nagel

Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data. — Paul Gibbons

The increasing technicality of the terminology employed is also a serious difficulty. It has become necessary to learn an extensive vocabulary before a book in even a limited department of science can be consulted with much profit. This change, of course, has its advantages for the initiated, in securing precision and concisement of statement; but it tends to narrow the field in which an investigator can labour, and it cannot fail to become, in the future, a serious impediment to wide inductive generalisations. — Thomas George Bonney

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos. — Andy Hargreaves

When you talk to a Republican, many of them just outright say, 'Yeah. Climate change isn't real,' without assessing the facts, and it's a big problem. It's not a red or blue issue, it's a green issue ... Not because of facts or science but because of emotion. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen. — Kate Wilhelm

In this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains - may change human beings themselves. — Martin Rees

[My advice] will one day be found
With other relics of 'a former world,'
When this world shall be former, underground,
Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled,
Baked, fried or burnt, turned inside-out, or drowned,
Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled
First out of, and then back again to Chaos,
The Superstratum which will overlay us. — Lord Byron

Theology is but a science of applied to God. As schools change theology must necessarily change. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas of truth are not. Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged. — Henry Ward Beecher

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. — Joshua Foer

Science Class

Would you invent some irrational explanation for we lost souls that the glaciers aren't really melting at all, that they are and will remain just as they always have been? Some rationale that claims the whole climate change scenario is really just a satanic plot, concocted by liberal secular humanists to trick the world into thinking that the glaciers have been melting for twice as long as the Bible says the Earth has been around. — Diogenes Of Mayberry

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king. — Johann Joachim Becher

Take note, theologians, that in your desire to make matters of faith out of propositions relating to the fixity of sun and earth you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those who would declare the earth to stand still and the sun to change position-eventually, I say, at such a time as it might be physically or logically proved that the earth moves and the sun stands still. — Galileo Galilei

Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions. — John Gray

How is it that, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, there are still some who would deny the dangers of climate change? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are not scientific, and it is remarkable how many economists, lawyers, journalists and politicians set themselves up as experts on the science. — Nicholas Stern

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today. — Paul Gibbons

Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you're wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted," like having a Snitch in Quidditch, "and every time you change your mind, you change yourself. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Today there remain but a few small areas on the world's map unmarked by explorers' trails. Human courage and endurance have conquered the Poles; the secrets of the tropical jungles have been revealed. The highest mountains of the earth have heard the voice of man. But this does not mean that the youth of the future has no new worlds to vanquish. It means only that the explorer must change his methods. — Roy Chapman Andrews

To live in modernity
an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news
is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory. — Alain De Botton

Intense sunlight rained down on a half-submerged city. Waves crashed between buildings that stood like waterlogged tombstones. Skyscrapers of smashed glass and twisted rusting metal jutted from the churning swell as islands of broken dreams. A familiar tower with a familiar clock face ... Big Ben. London stared back at Blue. What was left of it. A sea-drowned cemetery for a time and a place long dead. — Kev Heritage

It is inconceivable that our mind does not change according to where we might be, and how we perceived in it. — Tsan-Kuo Chang

I would love to see what's going to happen with science fiction with peoples' heads, because we still have people running around in the year 2050 or 2100 or 2200 and they have incredible technology and you see the effects: laser beams and rays and beaming down and beaming up. Incredible technical things happening, but everybody is still running around jealous, fighting, whacking, cheating. There's got to be something going on! Some kind of change. I'd like to see something starting to happen in that area, with the psychology of the human being and how that changed. — Leslie Nielsen

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"
to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will ve replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances. — Daniel J. Levitin

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted. — Carl Sagan

Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis. — Richard Lindzen

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. — Barbara W. Tuchman

In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984. — Aldous Huxley