C.P. Snow Quotes

I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right.

Morality existed only in action. It arose out of action: was formed and tested in action: expressed itself in action. That was why we mustn't cheapen it with words

A scientist has to be neutral in his search for the truth, but he cannot be neutral as to the use of that truth when found. If you know more than other people, you have more responsibility, rather than less.

If you pursue happiness you never find it.

The main issue [of the Scientific Revolution] is that the people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.

There is, of course, no complete solution. But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves.

I have done a certain amount of service for this college, most of it quite undistinguished, in a misspent lifetime. But the one service I will not do for this college is expose myself to the conversation of M H L Gay. It was jejune at the best of times. And now that what by courtesy one refers to as his mind appears to have given up the very unequal struggle, I find it bizarre but not rewarding.

Zeroth law: You must play the game
First law: You can't win
Second law: You can't break even
Third law: You can't quit the game.

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

He was a big, rather clumsy man, with a substantial bay window that started in the middle of the chest. I should guess that he was less muscular than at first sight he looked. He had large staring blue eyes and a damp and pendulous lower lip. He didn't look in the least like an intellectual. Creative people of his abundant kind never do, of course, but all the talk of Rutherford looking like a farmer was unperceptive nonsense. His was really the kind of face and physique that often goes with great weight of character and gifts. It could easily have been the soma of a great writer. As he talked to his companions in the streets, his voice was three times as loud as any of theirs, and his accent was bizarre…. It was part of his nature that, stupendous as his work was, he should consider it 10 per cent more so. It was also part of his nature that, quite without acting, he should behave constantly as though he were 10 per cent larger than life. Worldly success? He loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world...But there was that mysterious diffidence behind it all. He hated the faintest suspicion of being patronized, even when he was a world figure.

Archbishop Lang was once tactless enough to suggest that he supposed a famous scientist had no time for reading. Rutherford immediately felt that he was being regarded as an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month's reading. Then, half innocently, half malevol

Try as I might, I could never feel any great affection for a man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska - sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within.

Since the gap between the rich countries and the poor can be removed, it will be. If we are shortsighted, inept, incapable either of good-will or enlightened self-interest, then it may be removed to the accompaniment of war and starvation: but removed it will be. The questions are, how, and by whom.

No one outside can tell who is right for one. There are no rules. One knows it without help. Sometimes the rest of the world thinks one is wrong, but they cannot know.

I think, on the whole that scientists make slightly better husbands and fathers than most of us, and I admire them for it.

I should never have made a good scientist, but I should have made a perfectly adequate one.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question
such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?
not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

Smoothly he asked Winslow if he had been to any Christmas parties.
"Certainly not, my dear Orbell."
"Have you really neglected everyone?"
"I gave up going to my colleagues' wives' parties before you were born, my dear young man," Winslow said.
He added: "I have no small talk."
He made the remark with complacency, as though he had an abnormal amount of great talk.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes - as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.
[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.]

I knew well enough how slow the heart is to catch up with the brute facts. One looks forward to a joy: it is snatched away at the last minute: and, hours later, there are darts of illusory delight when one still feels that it is to come. Such moments cheat one and pass sickeningly away. So,

I was moving among two groups ... who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral, and psychological climate had so little in common that ... one might have crossed the ocean.

Nothing is easier to avoid than publicity. If one genuinely doesn't want it, one doesn't get it.

Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.

By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.

The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets.

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have that right.

It takes a very strong head to keep secrets for years and not go slightly mad. It isn't wise to be advised by anyone slightly mad.

Most of the scientists I have known well have felt - just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well - that the individual condition of each is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretence of a common culture. Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their major intellectual concern. This is serious for our creative, intellectual and, above all, normal life. It is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the "present, and to deny our hopes of the future. It is making it difficult or impossible for us to take good action.