John B. S. Haldane
A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.Collection: Teen
I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.Collection: Health
We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.Collection: Failure
Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.
There can be no truce between science and religion.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
I wish I had the voice of Homer to sing of rectal carcinoma.
In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.
It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we can imagine.
If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.
While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.
Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.
The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.
To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size.
The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern.
There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.Collection: Ignorance
This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn't happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.Collection: Modern Life
An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.Collection: Argument
It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.Collection: Supposing That
The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.Collection: Beetles
Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.Collection: Mistress
Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination.Collection: Reality
Money can buy a fine dog but it is kindness that makes him wag his tail.Collection: Dog
[Children] are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.Collection: Children
Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. "What inference," asked the latter, "might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?" Haldane replied: "An inordinate fondness for beetles."Collection: God
Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.Collection: Baby
The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.Collection: Spiritual
Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.Collection: Money
I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.Collection: Motivation
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.Collection: Passion
I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.Collection: Giving Up
Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.Collection: God
Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.Collection: Imagination
My final word, before I'm done, Is "Cancer can be rather fun"- Provided one confronts the tumour with a sufficient sense of humour. I know that cancer often kills, But so do cars and sleeping pills; And it can hurt till one sweats, So can bad teeth and unpaid debts. A spot of laughter, I am sure, Often accelerates one's cure; So let us patients do our bit To help the surgeons make us fit.Collection: Hurt
So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.Collection: Responsibility
A discussion between Haldane and a friend began to take a predictable turn. The friend said with a sigh, 'It's no use going on. I know what you will say next, and I know what you will do next.' The distinguished scientist promptly sat down on the floor, turned two back somersaults, and returned to his seat. 'There,' he said with a smile. 'That's to prove that you're not always right.'Collection: Science
My practise as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.Collection: Success
Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts.Collection: Reality
I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.Collection: Believe
It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".Collection: Ignorance
It wasn't until I had performed by first autopsy that I realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them in my imagination.Collection: Beautiful
Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.Collection: Science
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.Collection: Time
The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new.Collection: Flower
I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal.Collection: Morning