Commitment Quotes (4)
I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.
The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Science of Complexity (1988). In Adam Frank, The Constant Fire (2009), 35.
The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.
Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (1955), 67.
See also: | Answer (25) | Capacity (5) | Create (3) | Intellect (52) | Philosopher (35) | Problem (72) | Question (52) | Satisfy (4) | Scientist (78)
Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.
Commencement Address for Oberlin College, Ohio, 'Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution' ,(Jun 1965). Oberlin College website.
[W]e have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing. And by doing so, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power. Because we are scientists, we must say an unalterable yes to these questions; it is our faith and our commitment, seldom made explicit, even more seldom challenged, that knowledge is a good in itself, knowledge and such power as must come with it.
Speech to the American Philosophical Society (Jan 1946). 'Atomic Weapons', printed in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 90(1), 7-10. In Deb Bennett-Woods, Nanotechnology: Ethics and Society (2008), 23. Identified as a speech to the society in Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), 323.
See also: | Atomic Bomb (36) | Challenge (3) | Control (14) | Evil (13) | Faith (28) | Good (15) | Insight (16) | Knowledge (341) | Power (21) | Question (52) | Seldom (2) | Understand (5) | Weapon (24) | World (49)