John Maynard Smith Quotes

#1. Within his orbit, I was nothing but a flat noodle. And I don't know how much longer I can keep this up.

Dee Lestari

#2. In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music.

John Maynard Smith

#3. Scientific theories tell us what is possible; myths tell us what is desirable. Both are needed to guide proper action.

John Maynard Smith

#4. The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

John Maynard Smith

#5. I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.

John Maynard Smith

#6. I always knew I wanted to be in a band.

Hayley Williams

#7. Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.

John Maynard Smith

#8. You are a human being with thoughts and feelings and when you control who you are and what you like about yourself, you attract others and also attract good things within your life.

Scott Piles

#9. I can't go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me.

John Maynard Smith

#10. The case is this: God offers you one of the greatest mercies on this side of heaven and commands you to accept it. Why do you not accept this mercy in obedience to His command ... God offers you a pardon for all your sins.

John Wesley

#11. Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

John Maynard Smith

#12. Mathematics is so much easier than words mathematics makes things clear that words merely muddle and confuse and mess up.

John Maynard Smith

#13. Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?

Tom Butler-Bowdon

#14. It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be suggested to criticism ... It does not follow that, because a position is orthodox, it is wrong.

John Maynard Smith

#15. Regeneration can come only through a change of heart in the individual.

Henry Williamson

#16. The light is reached not by turning back from the darkness, but by going through it.

Leonard Roy Frank

#17. Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed

John Maynard Smith

#18. It is an occupational risk of biologists to claim, towards the end of their careers, that the problems which they have not solved are insoluble.

John Maynard Smith

#19. A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

Erich Fromm

#20. Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing.

Mel Brooks

#21. Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations.

John Maynard Smith

#22. It's a tougher gig than what people think it is. The proper, real, genuine, worldwide movie stars don't get a lot of downtime from the world outside. That's a tougher price, I think, than what people's fantasy of fame account for.

Ben Mendelsohn

#23. You couldn't have human society without language.

John Maynard Smith

#24. Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.

John Maynard Keynes

#25. Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo ! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.

John Maynard Keynes

#26. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

John Maynard Smith

#27. Language changes very fast.

John Maynard Smith

#28. I went to one of these signing conventions. It was one of the most interesting experiences I've had. It was so strange that people would pay for autographs. You keep thinking you should do a little dance for them as well or something.

Robert Pattinson

#29. Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population.

John Maynard Smith

#30. So far, we have been able to study only one evolving system and we cannot wait for interstellar flight to provide us with a second. If we want to discover generalizations about evolving systems, we will have to look at artificial ones.

John Maynard Smith