Inflammable Quotes

And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions-students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame,-might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs. (Thomas Carlyle)

The group of sorcerers who form the support for our elegant lady are more for ornament than real use. Some heads are so charged with inflammable gas that they have no need for balloons or sorcerers in order to fly away.

Francisco Goya

There are, in fact, very few organic zinc compounds; only the first members of the series, which correspond to the simplest organic radicals, can be prepared without too much difficulty, but they have the disadvantage of being spontaneously inflammable in air and are consequently very dangerous to handle.

Victor Grignard

I think we must allow that dephlogisticated air is in reality nothing but dephlogisticated water, or water deprived of its phlogiston; or, in other words, that water consists of dephlogisticated air united to phlogiston; and that inflammable air is either pure phlogiston, as Dr. Priestley and Mr. Kirwan suppose [and as Cavendish formerly supposed], or else water united to phlogiston; since, according to this supposition, these two substances united together form pure water. On the other hand, if the first explanation be true, we must suppose that dephlogisticated air consists of water united to a little nitrous acid and deprived of its phlogiston; but still the nitrous acid in it must make only a very small part of the whole, as it is found, that the phlogisticated air, which it is converted into, is very small in comparison of the dephlogisticated air.

Henry Cavendish

A spectacular anomaly came up with the hydrides of the nonmetals-an ugly bunch, about as inimical to life as one could get. Arsenic and antimony hydrides were very poisonous and smelly; silicon and phosphorous hydrides were spontaneously inflammable. I had made in my lab the hydrides of sulfur (H2S), selenium (H2Se), and tellurium (H2Te), all Group VI elements, all dangerous and vile-smelling gases. The hydride of oxygen, the first Group VI element, one might predict by analogy, would be a foul-smelling, poisonous, inflammable gas, too, condensing to a nasty liquid around −100°C. And instead it was water, H2O-stable, potable, odorless, benign, and with a host of special, indeed unique properties (its expansion when frozen, its great heat capacity, its capacity as an ionizing solvent, etc.) which made it indispensable to our watery planet, indispensable to life itself. What made it such an anomaly? [...].

Oliver Sacks