Gerald Holton Quote: "Persons living in this modern world who do not ..."

Choose a background or upload your own photo, then download a shareable quote image.

Upload background image Your file stays in the browser; nothing is sent to the server.

Quote

Persons living in this modern world who do not know the basic facts that determine their very existence, functioning, and surroundings, are living in a dream world. Such persons are, in a very real sense, not sane.
Gerald Holton / Physics Researcher
Dream
Facts
Real
Copy Quote

Only Text Quote

Persons living in this modern world who do not know the basic facts that determine their very existence, functioning, and surroundings, are living in a dream world. Such persons are, in a very real sense, not sane.
⇛ Gerald Holton (Physics Researcher)

Copy Quote Text

In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side-by-side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Gerald Holton Physics Researcher

Even in the best times, managing science has been compared to herding cats; it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all.

Gerald Holton Physics Researcher

The flight of most members of a profession to the high empyrean, where they can work peacefully on purely scientific problems, isolated from the turmoil of real life, was perhaps quite appropriate at an earlier stage of science; but in today's world it is a luxury we cannot afford.

Gerald Holton Physics Researcher

If the layman cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite. ... [The fundamental question becomes] are we still capable of self-government and therefore freedom? Margaret Mead wrote in a 1959 issue of Daedalus about scientists elevated to the status of priests. Now there is a name for this elevation, when you are in the hands of-one hopes-a benevolent elite, when you have no control over your political decisions. From the point of view of John Locke, the name for this is slavery.

Gerald Holton Physics Researcher

But the Promise showed their wildest dreams had simply not been wild enough.

Michael Card Singer-Songwriter

We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".