Quotes by John Haldane

• 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.
• A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.
• 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.
• Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.
• 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.
• 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.
• To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size.
• There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
• There can be no truce between science and religion.
• And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.
• My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
• It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we can imagine.
• 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.
• 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.
• I wish I had the voice of Homer to sing of rectal carcinoma.
• I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.
• The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern.
• 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.