James Bryant Conant Quotations

Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.

In every section of the entire area where the word science may properly be applied, the limiting factor is a human one. We shall have rapid or slow advance in this direction or in that depending on the number of really first-class men who are engaged in the work in question. ... So in the last analysis, the future of science in this country will be determined by our basic educational policy.

The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. . . . There will always be the false snobbery which tries to place one vocation above another. You will become a member of the aristocracy in the American sense only if your accomplishments and integrity earn this appellation.

Public education is a great instrument of social change. Through it, if we so desire, we can make our country more nearly a democracy without classes. To do so will require the efforts of us all-teachers, administrators, taxpayers and statesmen. Education is a social process, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today.

Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.

There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science-that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.

Democracy is a small hard core of common agreement, surrounded by a rich variety of individual differences.

It seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate.

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

Even the development of the steam engine owed but little to the advancement of science.

Every vital organization owes its birth and life to an exciting and daring idea.

Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations.

... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.

Therefore, a grotesque account of a period some thousands of years ago is taken seriously though it be built by piling special assumptions on special assumptions, ad hoc hypothesis [invented for a purpose] on ad hoc hypothesis, and tearing apart the fabric of science whenever it appears convenient. The result is a fantasia which is neither history nor science.

Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface.

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

A Harvard education consists of what you learn at Harvard while you are not studying.

Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten.

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

Just like a turtle, we only make progress if we stick our neck out.

Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.