Position quotes

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William_Bayliss

Mistakes

“But at the same time, there must never be the least hesitation in giving up a position the moment it is shown to be untenable. It is not going too far to say that the greatness of a scientific investigator does not rest on the fact of his having never made a mistake, but rather on his readiness to admit that he has done so, whenever the contrary evidence is cogent enough.”
  • Source: Sir William Bayliss, Principles of General Physiology (1915), x.xi.

Peter_Drucker

Weaknesses and Strengths

"A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths."
  • Source: Peter Drucker, “The Practice of Management” New York,: Harper, 1st ed. 1954 ; Routledge, 2012, p. 157.

Sabine_Hossenfelder

Quantum Opinion

“I think we need a political quantum orientation so that you can hold all political positions at the same time as long as no one asks.”

Louisa_Gilder

Quantum Cause

“From the quantum mechanical perspective, to measure the position of an electron is not to find out where it is but to cause it to be somewhere.”
  • Source: Louisa Gilder (2008) The Age of Entanglement:When Quantum Physics Was Reborn. New York, NY: Vintage Books/Random House.

Joseph_Heller

Lousy Earth

“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.”
  • Source: Heller, Joseph. 'Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition'. Chapter 39 'The Eternal City', page 483. Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Pierre-Simon_Laplace

System of Nature

“The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general affects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.”
  • Source: Pierre-Simon Laplace, 'Recherches, 1º, sur l'Intégration des Équations Différentielles aux Différences Finies, et sur leur Usage dans la Théorie des Hasards' (1773, published 1776). In Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 Vols. (1843-1912), Vol. 8, 144-5, trans. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (1997), 26.

Carl_Sagan

Changing Opinion

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
  • Source: Carl Sagan, Keynote address at CSICOP conference, 1987

Albert_Speer

Position to Know

“For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences - from the very beginning.”
  • Source: From the book "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer, published 1970 by Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-0-684-82949-4. Chapter 2, page 19.