Nobel Lecture Quotes

Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with. ~ Robert Woodrow Wilson

One can still say that quantum mechanics is the key to understanding magnetism. When one enters the first room with this key there are unexpected rooms beyond, but it is always the master key that unlocks each door. ~ John H. Van Vleck

Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars. ~ William Golding

Finally, to the theme of the respiratory chain, it is especially noteworthy that David Kellin's chemically simple view of the respiratory chain appears now to have been right all along–and he deserves great credit for having been so reluctant to become involved when the energy-rich chemical intermediates began to be so fashionable. This reminds me of the aphorism: 'The obscure we see eventually, the completely apparent takes longer'. ~ Peter D. Mitchell

I thought in my Nobel Lecture I pointed that I was delighted that the Swedish Academy of Science did not quote anything about my current work right now, because the current work that my group is focusing on is actually both the time resolve electrons and possibly x-rays to be able to get the architecture of these molecules, the molecular structures themselves, of very complex biological systems. That's the ultimate goal. ~ Ahmed H. Zewail

In the first place, the preparation of the Nobel lecture which I am to give has shown me, even more clearly than I knew before, how many others share with me, often, indeed, have anticipated me, in the discoveries for which you have awarded me the prize. ~ Frederick Soddy

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
- Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993 ~ Toni Morrison

The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lies. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. ~ Harold Pinter

As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns. ~ Joseph Stiglitz

And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as he deserves, as a brute beast. This conclusion would have endeared itself to the warm heart of Alfred Nobel. My contribution to it makes me feel less unworthy of the honour which you have conferred upon me in his name. ~ Charles Nicolle

What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, 'The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.' We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty." Nadya ~ Masha Gessen

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. ~ Michael Gurnow

I bump into a group of girls congregating around a locker. Jessica, Willow (who is notably the only Willow enrolled in our 397-student class and in our 1,579-student school), and Abby. Miney has labeled them in my notebook, in block letters and underlined with a Sharpie:THE POPULAR BITCHES.

When she first used this designation, Miney had to give me a long lecture about how this wasn't an oxymoron, how someone could be both popular, which I presumed meant that lots of people liked you, and at the same time also be a bitch, which I presumed would have the opposite outcome. Apparently popularity in the context of high school has a negative correlation with people actually liking you but a high correlation with people wanting to be your friend. After careful consideration, this makes sense, though in my case, I am both an outlier and a great example of the fact that correlation does not imply causation. I am nice to everyone but without any upside: People neither like me nor want to be my friend. ~ Julie Buxbaum

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects. ~ Toni Morrison

I once interviewed Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics and a noted baseball enthusiast. I asked if it bothered him that he received less money for winning the Nobel Prize than Roger Clemens, who was pitching for the Red Sox at the time, earned in a single season. "No," Solow said. "There are a lot of good economists, but there is only one Roger Clemens." That is how economists think. ~ Charles Wheelan

...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India.... ~ The New York Times

In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society. ~ Desmond Tutu

At the beginning of each lecture I say, 'Here's a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you'll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.' ~ Robert Cialdini

We [Corbis] make it so easy to call up images, whether art or people or beaches or sunsets or Nobel Prize winners. ~ Bill Gates

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. "The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize." "Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat. ~ Alan Bennett

While my parents never had the time or money to secure university education themselves, they were adamant that their children should. In comfort and in love, we were taught the joys of knowledge and of work well done. I only regret that neither my mother nor my father could live to see the day I would accept the Nobel Prize. ~ Sheldon Lee Glashow

It would be fine, if only I knew how to turn the shower off." Guinzburg laughed. "Perhaps you should ask Miss Redwood to come to your rescue." "If she did, I'm not sure I'd know how to turn her off." "Ah, so she's already subjected you to her lecture on the importance of getting Nothing Ventured on to the bestseller list as quickly as possible. ~ Jeffrey Archer

In opening your doors to woman, it is mind that will enter the lecture room, it is intelligence that will ask for food; sex will never be felt where science leads for the atmosphere of thought will be around every lecture. ~ Harriot Kezia Hunt

Defective is an adjective that has long been deemed too freighted for liberal discourse, but the medical terms that have supplanted it - illness, syndrome, condition - can be almost equally pejorative in their discreet way. We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy. In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation defines energy/matter as behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle, which suggests that it is both, and posits that it is our human limitation to be unable to see both at the same time. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wavelike question. A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness.

Physicists gain certain insights from understanding energy as a wave, and other insights from understanding it as a particle, and use quantum mechanics to reconcile the information they have gleaned. Similarly, we have to examine illness and identity, understand that observation will usually happen in one domain or the other, and come up with a syncretic mechanics. We need a vocabulary in which the two concepts are not opposites, but compatible a ~ Andrew Solomon

Thanks. And I'll give Brayden a talking-to so he doesn't try anything on Thursday."
My mind was still full of Latin and Shakespeare. "Try what?"
Trey shook his head. "Honestly, Melbourne, I don't know Trey shook his head. "Honestly, Melbourne, I don't know how you've survived this long in the world without me."
"Oh," I said, blushing. "That." Great. Now I had something else to worry about.
Trey scoffed. "Between you and me, Brayden's probably the last guy in the world you have to worry about. I think he's as clueless as you are. If I didn't care about your virtue so much, I'd actualy probably give him a lecture on how to try something. ~ Richelle Mead

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work. ~ Joshua Lederberg

Nature is man's teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence. ~ Alfred Nobel

Japan has more specialists of Immanuel Kant than Germany does
[RIS 2016 Lecture on A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World] ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Good wishes alone will not ensure peace. ~ Alfred Nobel

In a way, the Nobel Prize has been something of a pain in the neck, though there was at least one time that I got some fun out of it, Shortly after I won the Prize, Gweneth and I received an invitation from the Brazilian government to be the guests of honor at the Carnaval celebrations in Rio. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Now that Obama is at war in a 3rd country, does that mean he has to give back his Nobel Peace Prize? ~ Mort Sahl

In one department of his [Joseph Black's] lecture he exceeded any I have ever known, the neatness and unvarying success with which all the manipulations of his experiments were performed. His correct eye and steady hand contributed to the one; his admirable precautions, foreseeing and providing for every emergency, secured the other. I have seen him pour boiling water or boiling acid from a vessel that had no spout into a tube, holding it at such a distance as made the stream's diameter small, and so vertical that not a drop was spilt. While he poured he would mention this adaptation of the height to the diameter as a necessary condition of success. I have seen him mix two substances in a receiver into which a gas, as chlorine, had been introduced, the effect of the combustion being perhaps to produce a compound inflammable in its nascent state, and the mixture being effected by drawing some string or wire working through the receiver's sides in an air-tight socket. The long table on which the different processes had been carried on was as clean at the end of the lecture as it had been before the apparatus was planted upon it. Not a drop of liquid, not a grain of dust remained. ~ Henry Peter Brougham

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion. ~ Steven Weinberg

On winning Literature Nobel Prize: I was actually in the street. Yes, I was in the street. It was my daughter who notified me. ~ Patrick Modiano

Here's the scientific community saying, fundamentally, "If we don't change our ways, we're screwed." And they got no attention at all. Even though the Union of Concerned Scientists put out this statement which was signed by more than half of all the Nobel laureates in science and another 1,500 distinguished scientists. ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

Professors simply can't discuss a thing. Habit compels them to deliver a lecture. ~ Hal Boyle

If there is a Nobel prize for dirt and filth, India will win it, no doubt. ~ Jairam Ramesh

Excerpt from my lecture Sunday at Soul-Esteem Center
10 Commandments - God knew when he gave us choice some would make the wrong choices, but God wanted his creation, man, to have free will and felt later it necessary to write the 10 Commandants as a reminder of how God wanted his creations to perform. The 10 Commandants contain 5 positives and five negatives ~ I. Alan Appt

It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize. ~ Stephen Hawking

The zoologist is delighted by the differences between animals, whereas the physiologist would like all animals to work in fundamentally the same way. ~ Alan Hodgkin

Oh, we solved that long ago!" Rubedo chuckled. "I believe that was Greengallows, Henrik Greengallows? Is that right, my love? Ancient history has never been my subject. A famous case study even reported a method for turning straw into gold! The young lady who discovered it wrote a really rather thin paper - but she toured the lecture circuit for years! Her firstborn refined it, so that she could make straw from gold and solve the terrible problem of housing for destitute brownies."

"Hedwig Greengallows, my dear," mused Citrinitas. "Henrik was just her mercurer. Men are so awfully fond of attributing women's work to their brothers! ~ Catherynne M. Valente

I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and society that the scientist can appreciate better than anyone else, and if he does not insist on this significance no one else will, with the result that the relation of science to society will become warped, to the detriment of everybody. ~ Percy Williams Bridgman

Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society. ~ Krishan Kumar

Justice is to be found only in imagination. ~ Alfred Nobel

In whatever relationship I get into, I have to keep some parts of myself tucked away.
Another part of it is that meeting new people is often a lesson for them on race and there is just not enough time in my life to continue delivering that lecture. ~ Gita Jackson

My first reaction on being awarded the Nobel Prize was, actually, I thought of Fischer Black, my colleague. He unfortunately had passed away. And there was no doubt in my mind that if he were still alive, he would have been a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize. ~ Myron Scholes

First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn't make enough for
them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started a
dancing-school; but they didn't know no more how to dance than a kangaroo
does; so the first prance they made the general public jumped in and
pranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution;
but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up and give them a
solid good cussing, and made them skip out. ~ Mark Twain

Nobel was a genuine friend of peace. He even went so far as to believe that he had invented a tool of destruction, dynamite, which would make war so senseless that it would become impossible. He was wrong. ~ Alva Myrdal

Teaching Ramanujan was like writing on a blackboard covered with excerpts from a more interesting lecture. ~ Lawrence Young

The patience and the humility of the face she loved so well was a better lesson to Jo than the wisest lecture, the sharpest reproof. ~ Louisa May Alcott