The communication of modern science to the ordinary citizen, necessary, important, desirable as it is, cannot be considered an easy task. The prime obstacle is lack of education. ... There is also the difficulty of making scientific discoveries interesting and exciting without completely degrading them intellectually. ... It is a weakness of modern science that the scientist shrinks from this sort of publicity, and thus gives an impression of arrogant mystagoguery.
John ZimanRelated topics
citizen communication degrading desirable difficulty easy education exciting gives impression lack making modern necessary obstacle ordinary prime publicity science scientist sort task thus weaknessRelated quotes
I come here to your beautiful country -' Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil after coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers. ‘- your beautiful country, I say,' he said defiantly. ‘...So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance - most necessary to men in prime of life - and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments...
Anthony Burgess
Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God-al-Dhat-is feminine.
Karen Armstrong
I know that most men - not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems - can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty - conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.
Leo Tolstoy
The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.
Henry James
Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Carl Jung
