Jacques Monod Quotes

#1. Chance and necessity.

Jacques Monod

#2. Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.

Jacques Monod

#3. The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. ... Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050.

Jacques Monod

#4. What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant.

Jacques Monod

#5. What I have tried to show is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity - that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe.

Jacques Monod

#6. In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science.

Jacques Monod

#7. Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.

Jacques Monod

#8. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Jacques Monod

#9. In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.

Jacques Monod

#10. There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.

Jacques Monod

#11. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

Jacques Monod

#12. Man finally knows that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the Universe, from which he emerged by accident.

Jacques Monod

#13. A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.

Jacques Monod

#14. Man's destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.

Jacques Monod

#15. Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.

Jacques Monod