Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer (6 page)
On October 14, 1912, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a deranged immigrant just before entering a hall in Milwaukee to give a campaign speech
276. If we wanted to regain freedom, we were forced to strike. We told the Soviets that you can enter with your tanks if you wish. Then, we will put flowers in the guns of those tanks and your soldiers will sooner or later be forced to open the tanks and get out and get some air. When they are out, our girls will kiss them to death. However, we are not going to work for you anymore.
Lech Walesa
PEACE, 1983
277. For more than forty years I have selected my collaborators on the basis of their intelligence and their character and not on the basis of their grandmothers, and I am not willing for the rest of my life to change this method.
Fritz Haber
CHEMISTRY, 1918
Letter of resignation as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, 1933, after being instructed to dismiss the Jews in his department
278. Losing an arm is more an inconvenience than a catastrophe.
Eric Cornell
PHYSICS, 2001
Cornell lost an arm and shoulder to necrotizing fasciitis in 2004
279. Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilities; it's choosing the ones you want.
Toni Morrison
LITERATURE, 1993
280. Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
281. The real definition of loneliness . . . is to live without responsibility.
Nadine Gordimer
LITERATURE, 1991
282. I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore
LITERATURE, 1913
283. A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
284. When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925
285. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama
PEACE, 1989
286. The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
287. You and I belong, good friends, to a group that gets up early. We get up early because we don't sleep much. And we don't sleep much because the world doesn't let us sleep. And in turn, we try our best not to let the world sleep. That when people suffer anywhere, either we shout or we whisper, but at least we try to wake it up.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
288. Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the sirffering of mankind.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
289. What matters today is not the difference between those who believe and those who do not believe, but the difference between those who care and those who don't.
GeorgesPire
PEACE, 1958
290. Only the tortured can understand those who have endured torture.
Yasser Arafat
PEACE, 1994
291. How can you expect a man who is warm to understand one who is cold?
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
LITERATURE, 1970
292. Without forgiveness there is no future.
Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984
293. In every language, every culture, the most difficult words you have to say are: "I'm sorry. Forgive me."
Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 198 4
294. True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.
Nelson Mandela
PEACE, 1993
295. We have gone on our knees before God Almighty to pray for his forgiveness.
F. W. deKlerk
PEACE, 1993
296. I have always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
297. Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
On Bertrand Russell, whose appointment to a post at City College, New York, was revoked on grounds that he was "morally unfit"
298. It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
Friedrich von Hayek
ECONOMICS, 1974
299. Don't yell at me. But if you must yell, at least don't do it in unison.
Boris Pasternak
LITERATURE, 1958
To hecklers during his address to the Plenum of the Soviet Writers Union, 1957
300. A man of great common sense and good taste—meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
George Bernard Shaw
LITERATURE, 1925
301. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
302. When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
303. If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France
LITERATURE, 1921
304. Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
305. Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964
306. The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.
V. S. Naipaul
LITERATURE, 2001
307. The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
308. It is precisely the stupidest people who are most sincere in their mistaken beliefs.
Norman Angell
PEACE, 1933
309. Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.
V. S. Naipaul
LITERATURE, 2001
After teaching at Wellesley College for a year
310. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
311. To succeed in science, you have to avoid dumb people.
James Watson
MEDICINE, 1962
312. As history has repeatedly proven, it is not with the brass hats but with the brass heads that the danger to our country lies.
George C. Marshall
PEACE, 1953
Much has been written about the emotions by authors who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But reflection on this topic is not the exclusive domain of professional writers.
Nobel laureates who write of human experiences tend to do so with authority, often informed by extreme experiences in their own lives. This is readily apparent in the Holocaust writings of Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertesz. Other examples include Kenzaburo Oe and Pearl S. Buck, both of whom brought up brain-damaged children. Heinrich Boll, Rene-Samuel Cassin, Camilo Jose Cela, Renato Dulbecco, Ernest Hemingway, and Francois Jacob were all gravely wounded in battle; in the case of Jacob, forcing him to give up his long-cherished ambition to become a surgeon.
Laureates are no more immune to tragedy than are the rest of humanity. Richard Feynman's beloved wife died of TB at the age of twenty-two. Ilya Mechnikov's wife also died of TB after only five years of marriage, causing him such anguish that he attempted suicide. Other laureates, including Albert Camus, Kenzaburo Oe, Donald Cram, Roald Hoffmann, Harry Martinson, and Gabriela Mistral, lost, by death or abandonment, one or both parents when young. Theodore Roosevelt's mother and his first wife died of different causes on the same day. The life of Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, was particularly tragic. His wife
died after twenty-two years of marriage, he lost two daughters in childbirth, his elder son was killed in World War I, and the younger was executed after the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.
But despite such traumas, when they write about emotions, the mood of most Nobel laureates is one of affirmation rather than of despair. Few could be described as hardened pessimists. In experiencing the joys and tragedies of life, and emerging with more insight and compassion, Nobel laureates are often models of sanity and fortitude in the face of the human predicament.
313. What sky! What light! Ah in spite of all it is a blessed thing to be alive in such weather, and out of hospital.
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969
314. You must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
Andre Gide
LITERATURE, 1947
315. The man who for the first time picks a small flower so that he can have it near him while he works has taken a step toward joy in life.
Hermann Hesse
LITERATURE, 1946
316. Pleasure may be achieved without paying the price of strenuous effort, but joy cannot.
Konrad Lorenz
MEDICINE, 1973
317. An unshared happiness is not happiness.
Boris Pasternak
LITERATURE, 1958
318. An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
LITERATURE, 1911
319. To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
320. There is no better way to clothe one's grief than to celebrate another's joy.
Sheldon Glashow
PHYSICS, 1979
321. Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
322. Junk mail is the mail that gives me the greatest pleasure in the world, because I know immediately what to do with it.
Roald Hoffmann
CHEMISTRY, 1981
323. A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, "You look very unhappy"; whereupon I answered fiercely, "How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?"
Wolfgang Pauli
PHYSICS, 1945
324. For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!
Dag Hammarsköld
PEACE, 1961
325. To say Yes to life is at one and the same time to say Yes to oneself.
Dag Hammarsköld
PEACE, 1961
326. Thank you, God. I'm not sure why. But thank you.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
LITERATURE, 1956
327. Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 198 6
328. To state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
329. Man should consider himself fortunate to have been a contemporary of the rose.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
LITERATURE, 1956
330. In the presence of the most beautiful things we always experience not only pleasure but also grief or fear.
Hermann Hesse
LITERATURE, 1946
331. One either serves the whole of man or does not serve him at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if what has to be done must be done to serve this need, he also needs pure beauty which is the bread of his heart.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
332. It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.
Paul Dirac
PHYSICS, 1933
333. Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
334. Unearned suffering is redemptive.
Martin Luther King
PEACE, 1964
335. One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962
336. This is a crushing blow, to be left out of this sperm bank. I felt badly enough when I only made it into President Nixon's second enemies list.
George Wald
MEDICINE, 1967
The short-lived "Repository for Germinal Choice" was founded in the 1970s. It was reported that three Nobel laureates contributed, but no Nobel babies resulted.
337. There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for "melancholy of relationships past." It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music.
Kary Mullis
CHEMISTRY, 1993
338.1 am one of the millions everywhere in the world who will never recover from the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the way it came about.
Pearl S. Buck
LITERATURE, 1938
339. I have always preferred the folly of the passions to the wisdom of indifference.
Anatole France
LITERATURE, 1921
340. If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Desmond Tutu
PEACE, 1984
341. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
342. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
343. The world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent when and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
344. I have always thought that if the man who places hope in the human condition is a fool, then he who gives up hope in the face of circumstances is a coward.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
345. It is hope that gives life a meaning. And hope is based on the prospect of being able one day to turn the actual world into a possible one that looks better. When the French writer Tristan Bernard was arrested with his wife by the Gestapo, he told her: "The time of fear is over. Now comes the time of hope."
François Jacob
MEDICINE, 1965
346. Remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
Boris Pasternak
LITERATURE, 1958
347. Never flinch, never weary, never despair.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
348. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
LITERATURE, 1957
349. Without confidence in a cause, there is no action. Ignorance may be enlightened, superstition wiped out; intolerance may become tolerant, and hate be changed into love; ideas may be quickened, intelligence widened, and men's hearts may be ennobled; but from pessimism which can see nothing but gloomy visions nothing is to be expected.
Klas Arnoldson
PEACE, 1908
350. No horse named Morbid ever won a race.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
351. To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.
Peter Medawar
MEDICINE, i960
352. Defeatism about the past is a grievous error; defeatism about the future is a crime.
Philip Noel-Baker
PEACE, 1959
353. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.
Elie Wiesel
PEACE, 1986
354. You have pessimists and optimists, and of the two the pessimists are the better informed.
Imre Kertész
LITERATURE, 2002
355. If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978
356. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
