Waste Quotes (3)
If sleeping and dreaming do not perform vital biological functions, then they must represent nature's most stupid blunder and most colossal waste of time.
Evolutionary Psychiatry (1996, 2000), 219.
It is a common failing–and one that I have myself suffered from–to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.
Advice to a Young Scientist (1979), 73.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I am told that someone accused me of saying that if the Ministry of Fuel and Power were boring for coal and they went through a layer of gold nine feet thick they would throw it away because they wouldn't know what to do with it, Sir, I only said four feet thick.
Remark while accepting a presentation upon his retirement from I.C.I. As quoted by Peter Allen in obituary, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Nov 1976), 22, 117.
See also: | Speech (10)