C.P. Snow > Quotes

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
― C.P. Snow

“The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.”
― C.P. Snow

“Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.”
― Charles Percy Snow, The Masters

“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.”
― C.P. Snow

“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.”
― Charles Percy Snow

“Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.”
― C.P. Snow, Variety of Men

“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 at the illiteracy 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 about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”
― Charles Percy Snow

“The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.”
― C.P. Snow

“One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.”
― C.P. Snow, Variety of Men

“Technology is a queer thing; it brings you great gifts with one hand and it stabs you in the back with the other.”
― Charles Percy Snow

“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”
― Charles Percy Snow, The Sleep of Reason

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion.”
― C.P. Snow

“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.]”
― C.P. Snow, The Search

“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.”
― C.P. Snow, Science and Government

“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 malevolently: "And what do you manage to read, your Grice?"

I am afraid", said the Archbishop, somewhat out of his depth, "that a man in my position doesn't really have the leisure..."

Ah yes, your Grice," said Rutherford in triumph, "it must be a dog's life! It must be a dog's life!”
― C.P. Snow

“There is no getting away from it. It is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution in India, Africa, South-east Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, within fifty years. There is no excuse for western man not to know this. And not to know that this is the one way out through the three menaces which stand in our way — H-bomb war, over-population, the gap between the rich and the poor. This is one of the situations where the worst crime is innocence.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“Groups of men, even small groups, act strangely differently from individuals. They have less humour and simpler humour, are more easy to frighten, more difficult to charm, distrust the mysterious more, and enjoy firm, flat, competent expositions which a man by himself would find inexcusably dull. Perhaps”
― C.P. Snow, The Masters

“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.”
― C.P. Snow, The Masters

“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.”
― C.P. Snow

“Of books, though, very little. And of the books
which to most literary persons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at
all. It isn’t that they’re not interested in the psychological or moral or social life. In the social life,
they certainly are, more than most of us. In the
moral, they are by and large the soundest group of
intellectuals we have; there is a moral component
right in the grain of science itself, and almost all
scientists form their own judgments of the moral
life. In the psychological they have as much interest as most of us, though occasionally I fancy they
come to it rather late. It isn’t that they lack the interests. It is much more that the whole literature of
the traditional culture doesn’t seem to them relevant to those interests. They are, of course, dead
wrong. As a result, their imaginative understanding is less than it could be. They are self-impoverished.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of
no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the
physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful
and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“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,”
― C.P. Snow, The Masters

“She had heard me say, often enough, that choices never took as long to make as we pretend: the time was taken in finding the reasons to justify them.”
― C.P. Snow, The Affair

“For, of course, one truth is straightforward. Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor. I use the word 'hope' in a crude and prosaic sense. I have not much use for the moral sensibility of anyone who is too refined to use it so. It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don't matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion.

But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.”
― C.P. Snow, The Masters

“It’s hard to think without a future.’ That”
― C.P. Snow, The Masters

“it was the core of diffidence and pride flaming out again. He would have liked, even now, to escape from the contest. He told himself ‘it did not matter in the slightest’. He assured himself of that, because he could not bear to fail. Then”
― C.P. Snow, The Masters

“elephantine in their midst, pulled up her”
― C.P. Snow, The Conscience of the Rich

“one is dreadfully vulnerable through those one loves’.”
― C.P. Snow, The Masters