Merit Quotes - page 15
By taking issue with Bell on this score, I am not saying that I am satisfied with my understanding of quantum mechanics. I share Feynman's belief that no one really understands quantum mechanics. But we should not exaggerate our embarrassment; it is ample as it stands. In any event, I agree with Bell that the foundations continue to merit the closest scrutiny.
Kurt Gottfried
I did speak extensively - often quite critically - about the reviled work of Richard Goldschmidt, particularly about aspects of his thought that might merit a rehearing. This material has often been confused with punctuated equlibrium by people who miss the crucial issue of scaling, and therefore regard all statements about rapidity at any level as necessarily unitary, and necessarily flowing from punctuated equilibrium. In fact, as the long treatment in Chapter 5 of this book should make clear, my interest in Goldschmidt resides in issues bearing little relationship with punctuated equilibrium, but invested instead in developmental questions that prompted my first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny. The two subjects, after all, are quite separate, and rooted in different scales of rapidity - hopeful monsters in genuine saltation, and punctuated equilibrium in macroevolutionary punctuation.
Stephen Jay Gould
The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do.
Stephen Jay Gould
Certainly it is permitted to anyone to put forward whatever hypotheses he wishes, and to develop the logical consequences contained in those hypotheses. But in order that this work merit the name of Geometry, it is necessary that these hypotheses or postulates express the result of the more simple and elementary observations of physical figures.
Giuseppe Peano
Andrew Jackson then is a sturdy obstacle to the Democrats' ongoing and increasingly frenzied campaign to erase from America's history all the unsavory things their party has championed for most of its existence, namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, socialism, and, most recently the slaughter of infants. And so their longtime hero Andrew Jackson has been, as Sam Spade once said, chosen to take the fall alongside the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to help erase the Democrats' consistently reprehensible behavior and policies from the history books. But there is a rub. None of the women the Democrats have so far raised as General Jackson's replacement in any way merit representation in the pantheon of patriots, nation-builders, and military leaders that grace the few denominations of our paper currency.
Michael Scheuer
Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, says, ‘Since the world is judged by its majority, and the individual is judged by the majority, if he performs one Mitzva, happy is he, for he has sentenced himself and the whole world to a scale of merit. If he commits one sin, woe unto him, for he has sentenced himself and the whole world to a scale of sin.' (...) Moreover, it is written, "one sinner destroyeth much good.”.
Yehuda Ashlag
American statesmanship, worthy of the name, is now taxing its energies to frame measures to meet the demands of constantly increasing expansion of power, responsibility and duty. Without fault or merit on either side, theirs or ours, the balance is largely in our favor. Like the grand old forests, renewed and enriched from decaying trunks once full of life and beauty, but now moss-covered, oozy and crumbling, we are destined to grow and flourish while they decline and fade.
Frederick Douglass
