"Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind."
-Lewis Thomas
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"The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.“
-Lewis Thomas
posted in Science
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"Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television."
-Lewis Thomas
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"The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature."
-Lewis Thomas
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"I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way."
-Lewis Thomas
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"If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society."
-Lewis Thomas
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"We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors."
-Lewis Thomas
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"Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff."
-Joel Edgerton
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"I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it."
-Diane Cilento
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"Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts."
-Brian Aldiss
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"We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space."
-Nick Lampson
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"The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development."
-John Desmond Bernal
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"The recognition of the art that informs all pure science need not mean the abandonment for it of all present art, rather it will mean the completion of the transformation of art that has already begun."
-John Desmond Bernal
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