Martin Lewis Perl Quotes

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

My parents regarded school teachers as higher beings, as did many immigrants.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere. It is always a good plan for a speculative experimenter to have two experiments going, or at least one going and one being built.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.