Charles Francis Richter Men Quotations

The most remarkable feature about the magnitude scale was that it worked at all and that it could be extended on a worldwide basis. It was originally envisaged as a rather rough-and-ready procedure by which we could grade earthquakes. We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.

The laboratory routine, which involves a great deal of measurement, filing, and tabulation, is either my lifeline or my chief handicap, I hardly know which.

It is a common remark that men talk most who think least; just as frogs cease their quacking when a light is brought to the water-side.

Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.

Spring makes everything young again except man.

Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.

So we tried to keep the interpretation of the 'size of the earthquake' as closely tied to the actual instrument observations involved as possible.

There is another common misapprehension that the magnitude scale is itself some kind of instrument or apparatus. Visitors will frequently ask to 'see the scale.'