Top 100 Nobel Laureate Quotes
#1. Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.
Edward Abbey
#2. I served the famous professors and scholars, and eventually they learned that the Reverend Moon is superior to them. Even Nobel laureate academics who thought they were at the center of knowledge are as nothing in front of me.
Sun Myung Moon
#3. Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.
Wole Soyinka
#4. Why demons, when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: 'And why angels, when man is angelic too?
Salman Rushdie
#5. Once in a while, I have to pinch myself to remind myself I am Nobel laureate, but that is not part of my work plan every day.
Mohamed ElBaradei
#6. How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#7. As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.
Iris Chang
#8. The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: "My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?" Late
Bill Bryson
#9. I cannot think of a greater symbol of human resistance and courage than our Nobel laureate colleague Andrei Sakharov.
Torsten Wiesel
#10. I believe that every Nobel Laureate has the feeling that this prize is really a gift - because nobody can or should work just for this prize.
Klaus Von Klitzing
#11. The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him.
A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of this network before it is accepted.
Sune Bergstrom
#12. For me to sit down here, even as a Nobel Laureate and make a prediction about which science I think that will be a mistake.
Ahmed H. Zewail
#13. Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, "in government, the scum rises to the top".
Walter E. Williams
#14. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"
Robert Kuttner
#15. I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world.
Dan Shechtman
#16. The zoologist is delighted by the differences between animals, whereas the physiologist would like all animals to work in fundamentally the same way.
Alan Hodgkin
#17. The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
Aaron Ciechanover
#19. In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a "discovery" of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.
Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar
#20. To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to esthetics.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
#21. Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.
John Galsworthy
#22. Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
#23. I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.
Max F. Perutz
#24. I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy.
Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth
#25. He planet is just too small for these developing countries to repeat the economic growth in the same way that the rich countries have done it in the past. We don't have enough natural resources, we don't have enough atmosphere. Clearly, something has to change.
Mario J. Molina
#27. On examinations: Das Wissen ist der Tad der Forschung.
Knowledge is the death of research.
Nernst's motto.
Walther Nernst
#28. I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.
Linus Pauling
#29. Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.
Hideki Yukawa
#30. This [discovery of a cell-free yeast extract] will make him famous, even though he has no talent for chemistry.
{Comment on German scientist Eduard Buchner who later ironically won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery}
Adolf Von Baeyer
#31. Insulin is not a cure for diabetes; it is a treatment. It enables the diabetic to burn sufficient carbohydrates, so that proteins and fats may be added to the diet in sufficient quantities to provide energy for the economic burdens of life.
Frederick Grant Banting
#32. I do not believe that the present flowering of science is due in the least to a real appreciation of the beauty and intellectual discipline of the subject. It is due simply to the fact that power, wealth and prestige can only be obtained by the correct application of science.
Derek Barton
#33. It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]
William Shockley
#34. After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea, during the year 1923, that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalised by extending it to all material particles and notably to electrons.
Louis De Broglie
#35. In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.
Desmond Tutu
#36. Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").
Harriet Lerner
#37. Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.
[Stating how planets supporting life cannot be rare.]
Harold Urey
#38. The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable.
Frank Wilczek
#39. I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.
[Comment when told that he had won a Nobel prize, referring to the drug he discovered for the treatment of heart disease.]
James Whyte Black
#40. I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy ... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
George Porter
#41. I am one of those who think, like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.
Marie Curie
#42. Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates.
Melvin Schwartz
#43. As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics.
Otto Hahn
#44. I've just finished reading some of my early papers, and you know, when I'd finished I said to myself, 'Rutherford, my boy, you used to be a damned clever fellow.' (1911)
Ernest Rutherford
#45. But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing - a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.
George Smoot
#46. Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.
John C. Polanyi
#48. [When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]
Oh, no. Absolutely not ... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.
James D. Watson
#49. Nobody knows how the stand of our knowledge about the atom would be without him. Personally, Bohr is one of the amiable colleagues I have met. He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes himself to be in possession of the truth.
Albert Einstein
#50. When [Niels] Bohr is about everything is somehow different. Even the dullest gets a fit of brilliancy.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
#51. 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
#52. Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.
John Archibald Wheeler
#54. In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.
Edward Tatum
#55. My final remark to young women and men going into experimental science is that they should pay little attention to the speculative physics ideas of my generation. After all, if my generation has any really good speculative ideas, we will be carrying these ideas out ourselves.
Martin L. Perl
#57. One can still say that quantum mechanics is the key to understanding magnetism. When one enters the first room with this key there are unexpected rooms beyond, but it is always the master key that unlocks each door.
John H. Van Vleck
#58. One's instinct is at first to try and get rid of a discrepancy, but I believe that experience shows such an endeavour to be a mistake. What one ought to do is to magnify a small discrepancy with a view to finding out the explanation.
John William Strutt
#59. 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
#60. I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.
Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar
#61. Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.
Eugene Paul Wigner
#62. True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.
Willard F. Libby
#63. Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.
Kary Mullis
#64. Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one - Marie, the famous Madame Curie - and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.
Isaac Asimov
#65. More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.
Konrad Lorenz
#66. Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
#67. That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life - this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following.
Irene Joliot-Curie
#68. If the hand be held between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself ... For brevity's sake I shall use the expression 'rays'; and to distinguish them from others of this name I shall call them 'X-rays'.
Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen
#69. At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.
James D. Watson
#70. I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.
Arthur Kornberg
#71. Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.
Edgar Douglas Adrian
#72. Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.
Konrad Lorenz
#73. Since the beginning of physics, symmetry considerations have provided us with an extremely powerful and useful tool in our effort to understand nature. Gradually they have become the backbone of our theoretical formulation of physical laws.
Tsung-Dao Lee
#74. Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.
David H. Hubel
#75. If a problem is clearly stated, it has no further interest to the physicist.
Peter Debye
#76. A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes.
Jacobus Henricus Van 't Hoff
#77. Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#78. Reality is complicated. There is no justification for all of the hasty conclusions.
Hideki Yukawa
#79. I had fallen in love with a young man ... , and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis ... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery ...
Gertrude B. Elion
#80. Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life.
Francis Perrin
#81. I am sure my fellow-scientists will agree with me if I say that whatever we were able to achieve in our later years had its origin in the experiences of our youth and in the hopes and wishes which were formed before and during our time as students.
Felix Bloch
#82. I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much.
Gertrude B. Elion
#83. If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside. It takes a little luck to be able to distinguish gold from dross, but that is all.
Robert Koch
#84. We may fondly imagine that we are impartial seekers after truth, but with a few exceptions, to which I know that I do not belong, we are influenced - and sometimes strongly - by our personal bias; and we give our best thoughts to those ideas which we have to defend.
August Krogh
#85. I learned what research was all about as a research student [with] Stoppani ... Max Perutz, and ... Fred Sanger ... From them, I always received an unspoken message which in my imagination I translated as 'Do good experiments, and don't worry about the rest.
Cesar Milstein
#86. I am a Nobel Peace laureate and my business should be to try to bring stability, not to be a red rag to bulls.
Desmond Tutu
#87. [My study of the universe] leaves little doubt that life has occurred on other planets. I doubt if the human race is the most intelligent form of life.
Harold Urey
#88. Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cofactors can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.
Thomas Hunt Morgan
#89. [Pure research] is worth every penny it costs.
Harold Urey
#91. The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#92. It is because I know all that science can bring to the world that I shall continue my efforts to ensure that it contributes to the happiness of all men, whether they be white, black, or yellow, and not to their annihilation in the name of some divine mission or other.
Frederic Joliot-Curie
#93. Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.
John C. Polanyi
#94. As is known worldwide, Japan has tried to catch up with the western countries since the beginning of this century by importing science from them.
Kenichi Fukui
#95. I might paraphrase Churchill and say: never have I received so much for so little.
[Exemplifying humility, upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]
Luis Federico Leloir
#96. It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.
Maurice Wilkins
#97. If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
Joseph Rotblat
#98. Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.
Henry Hallett Dale
#99. Tapestries are made by many artisans working together. The contributions of separate workers cannot be discerned in the completed work, and the loose and false threads have been covered over. So it is in our picture of particle physics.
Sheldon L. Glashow
#100. Once a molecule is asymmetric, its extension proceeds also in an asymmetrical sense. This concept completely eliminates the difference between natural and artificial synthesis. The advance of science has removed the last chemical hiding place for the once so highly esteemed vis vitalis.
Hermann Emil Fischer
