Bertrand Russell Quotes

“What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.”

“Mindfulness is observing and asking why. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton asked why.”

“On a visit to the space program, President Kennedy asked me about the satellite. I told him that it would be more important than sending a man into space. “Why?” he asked. “Because,” I said, “this satellite will send ideas into space, and ideas last longer than men.”

“There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.”

“There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula.”

“What goes up must come down.”

“Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied 'Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit.”

“I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.”

“The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.”

“When the war ended in 1945, Robert Newton’s film career took off. And then he landed the part of Disney’s Long John Silver. “What accent do you want me to put on?” he asked Walt, in his natural thick West-country, ‘Cornwall/Devon/Dorset’ burr. Pointing at his face excitedly, “Why, that one.” Disney replied. And THE OFFICIAL PIRATE ACCENT was born. Newton went on to do another Long John Silver film, then a 26 part television series. He died early, aged 50, from chronic alcoholism, just the way a pirate would want to go. But he left the legacy of ‘the’ pirate accent ‘til the end of time. Every pirate ‘R’ or ‘Arrrgh’ joke you ever heard, owes its very life to the combination of Robert Newton, R. L. Stevenson, and Walt Disney. -- Renaissance Festival Survival Guide”