Stuart Firestein Quotes

#1. Daniel Wolpert, of Cambridge University, is fond of pointing out that IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer is capable of beating a grand master at the game of chess, but no computer has yet been developed that can move a chess piece from one square to another as well as a 3-year-old child.

Stuart Firestein

#2. If a person with a bullet in Dallas can change the world, imagine a person with an idea could do.

J. Michael Straczynski

#3. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#4. The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960.

Charles Murray

#5. To Sell Is Human, "Like it or not, we're all in sales now.

Carmine Gallo

#6. There was no safe place in all the world for me. My stomach was filled with ice water. Hearing Domini was the final straw. Something in me broke. All the King's horses and all the King's men would never be able to put me back together again.

Damien Echols

#7. Failure is also a test of dedication. It is a way to measure what you are passionate about and how deep that passion runs and how dependable it is. Science may seem methodical but it demands passion.

Stuart Firestein

#8. Cynicism often draws correct conclusions, but nobody could live by its lights.

Mason Cooley

#9. Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession's phlegm, and needs no ancestors.

Aaron Hill

#10. If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. - Alan Turing

Stuart Firestein

#11. I've always thought you should be able to freeze time. This way you could hit the Pause button at a really good point in your life so that nothing changes

Jennifer Niven

#12. Failures provide a certain kind of feedback that is then used in a process we call error correction. With this simple loop in place, knowing that something doesn't work can be as valuable as knowing that it does. Of course once again there are

Stuart Firestein

#13. Ignorance follows knowledge, not the other way around.

Stuart Firestein

#14. Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting.

Stuart Firestein

#15. Persistence in the face of failure is of course important, but it is not the same thing as dedication or passion. Persistence is a discipline that you learn; devotion is a dedication you can't ignore.

Stuart Firestein

#16. In other words, scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also miniscule, but rather on what they don't know. The one big fact is that science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it.

Stuart Firestein

#17. I think I can speak with a degree of authority ... today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.

Terry Hayes

#18. There are two types of stories: public and private.

Antonio Munoz Molina

#19. And I just keep going and going, picking up pins and stabbing them into the paper until the map is covered with places I'll never see and the clear plastic box is as empty as I am.

Tamara Ireland Stone

#20. Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.

Stuart Firestein