James Bryant Conant Quotes

A Harvard education consists of what you learn at Harvard while you are not studying.

Some of mankind’s most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

… scientific research is compounded of … empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.

There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science-that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.

Just like a turtle, we only make progress if we stick our neck out.

Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free
society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.