Misinterpreted Quotes

“A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid.

The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery.

The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions.

I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!”
― Richard Feynman

“Cease, stranger, cease those witching notes,
The art of syren choirs;
Hush the seductive voice that floats
Across the trembling wires.

Music's ethereal power was given
Not to dissolve our clay,
But draw Promethean beams from heaven
To purge the dross away.”
― John Henry Newman

“Disappointment focuses on ‘what is not,’ and completely misses the far greater reality of ‘what now is.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Intelligence without wisdom is nothing more than stupidity that looks smart.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Writers strive to create definitive statements but forget that their work is often viewed through the cracked spectacles of perception. Others can take what is written, twist it to their own agenda and present it back to the author as fact, contrary to the original intention.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Sometimes people do what they think is for the best, and their intentions are misinterpreted.”
― Theresa Breslin, Prisoner of the Inquisition

“Ideas are not dangerous. It is the deliberate or accidental misinterpretation and misapplication of them that makes them unstable and a starting point for morally-questionable behaviour.”
― Stewart Stafford