James Bryant Conant Quotes

#1. 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.

James Bryant Conant

#2. He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

#4. 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.

James Bryant Conant

#5. 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.

James Bryant Conant

#6. 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.

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

#14. Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant

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

James Bryant Conant