John B. S. Haldane Quotes

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.

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.

I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages:(i) this is worthless nonsense;(ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;(iii) this is true, but quite unimportant;(iv) I always said so.

The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.

If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.

Now, if the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the cooperation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.

I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.

Einstein – the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein’s name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.

I will jump into the river to save two brothers or eight cousins.

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.

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.