Philip Warren Anderson Quotations

Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors.

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult.

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

The prize seemed to change my professional life very little.

An important impression was my father's one Sabbatical year, spent in England and Europe in 1937.

The field of quantum valence fluctuations was another older interest which became much more active during this period, partly as a consequence of my own efforts.

I have also testified repeatedly and published some articles in favor of Small Science.

My own work in spin glass and its consequences has formed some of the intellectual basis for these interests.

One of our brainchildren is a still viable Science and Society course.

The Nobel Prize gives one the opportunity to take public stands.

The years since the Nobel Prize have been productive ones for me.

We atheists can... argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse.

Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

A souvenir of those years is a small cottage on the cliffs of Cornwall, where Joyce and I spend a spring month every year, hiking and seeing friends.

My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance.

Of course I am not religious—I don't in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so.