"“Now do you see my point?” “I’m beginning to see through a glass darkly. You mean that the mental make-up of a leading politician is likely to be such that he couldn’t dream it possible that anyone could find the prospect of becoming a dictator wholly unpalatable.” “Yes, I can see it all, Chris,” Leicester grinned. “Graft everywhere, executions just for the laughs, no wife or daughter safe.”"
Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer. With Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge and William Alfred Fowler, he formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis in the influential B2FH paper.
"Assuming children and students do not wish to learn anything, then I suppose the present method of teaching is about right. It seems predicated on the notion that learning is an unpleasant medicine which must be swallowed at any price. But where a child is keen to learn, present methods seem woefully and even shockingly inadequate."
"It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas."
"Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."
"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."
"Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. ...As soon as I learned from my mother that there was there was a place called school that I must attend willy-nilly—a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a teacher, not about matters decided by yourself—I was appalled."
"Ifs and buts are the stuff of politics, Mr. Parkinson. As a scientist I am concerned with facts not with motives, suspicions, and airy-fairy nothingness."