Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In all this massness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.Isaac Asimov
Television is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
Clive Barnes
Clive Barnes
There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
Neils Bohr
Neils Bohr
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
In making the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choice, we can also begin to make more useful connections between arts and sciences. Consider a recent exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, called “Degas as Photographer.” This was, in the scheme of things, a minor exhibition. The Impressionist painter only turned to photography in the 1890s, and he was a self-proclaimed amateur. His photographs are extremely literary: many were evidently undertaken as an homage to Mallarmé, whose whole family is depicted in numerous poses (as is the Halévy family, Laure Halévy having been a model for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes). Some of the photographs are narrative, telling the sad story of one of Mallarmé’s orphan nieces, and there are allusions to specific Mallarmé poems in one or two pictures. But the photographs also have a certain scientific interest, since Degas produced a number of photographs that were inadvertently solarized, and he kept them because he found them visually so striking. Then, too, Degas was one of the first photographers to use enlargement. A fairly pedestrian realistic contact print acquired, due to the time exposure, a blurring of edges that makes these photographs painterly–but, ironically, not at all like Degas’s own paintings, which emphasize the sharp outlines of the body.
Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff
Paul Devlin Do you see good poetry, or poetry as a fine art, threatened by the internet, by explosions of communications in general? Do you think people have less time/strong attention spans to spend absorbed in a poem than they did even twenty, to say nothing of two-hundred years ago?
Answer I’m more worried about people’s ability to pay informed attention—to be able to listen to—rather than merely hear—music, for example; to be able to detect and be negatively affected by specious argument and deception in public speech of all kinds; to know any history and geography; to understand not only something about science but about explanation in general; to read and speak foreign languages—in short, about the fate of knowledge in a discursive world that ignores or suppresses it and can deal only with what it calls “information”. When you have educated readers, good poetry will take care of itself.
John Hollander (2003)
Answer I’m more worried about people’s ability to pay informed attention—to be able to listen to—rather than merely hear—music, for example; to be able to detect and be negatively affected by specious argument and deception in public speech of all kinds; to know any history and geography; to understand not only something about science but about explanation in general; to read and speak foreign languages—in short, about the fate of knowledge in a discursive world that ignores or suppresses it and can deal only with what it calls “information”. When you have educated readers, good poetry will take care of itself.
John Hollander (2003)
