Jeffrey Robbins > Quotes

“The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflecting all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected in the dark sea of time.”
― Jeffrey Robbins

“If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we’re going, what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and then look for some mystic answer to these problems.”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified–how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, maybe you can doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“I believe, therefore, that although it is not the case today, that there may some day come a time, I should hope, when it will be fully appreciated that the power of government should be limited; that governments ought not to be empowered to decide the validity of scientific theories, that that is a ridiculous thing for them to try to do; that they are not to decide the various descriptions of history or of economic theory or of philosophy. Only in this way can the real possibilities of the future human race be ultimately developed.”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

“I’ve learned how to live without knowing. I don’t have to be sure I’m succeeding, and as I said before about science, I think my life is fuller because I realize that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m delighted with the width of the world!”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“it is a part of the adventure of science to try to find a limitation in all directions and to stretch the human imagination as far as possible everywhere. Although at every stage it has looked as if such an activity was absurd and useless, it often turns out at least not to be useless”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right so long as it doesn’t attack religion, was the clue that I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn’t attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from modern society except for its applications, and thus be isolated”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“As long as it’s possible, we should disregard authority whenever the observations disagree with it”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Jeffrey Robbins, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman