Chemist

🇫🇷Louis Pasteur

Science

1904–1989

"God grant that by my persevering labours I may bring a little stone to the frail and ill-assured edifice of our knowledge of those deep mysteries of Life and Death where all our intellects have so lamentably failed."

"For the unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion."

Niels Bohr

Philosophy

1885–1962

"Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them."

🇺🇸James Watson

Science

1928–2025

"If you can't be criticized, that's very dangerous."

Leonardo da Vinci

Mathematics

Renaissance

1452–1519

"The false interpreters of nature declare that quicksilver is the common seed of every metal, not remembering that nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world."

Margaret Thatcher

Politics

1925–2013

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them."

🇺🇸Francis Collins

Medicine

1950–1921

"... God must also be an incredible physicist ... there is this phenomenal fine-tuning of the universe that makes complexity and, therefore, life possible."

Joseph Priestley

Science

1733–1804

"From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices."

🇷🇺Ivan Pavlov

Medicine

1849–1936

"I was, I am and will remain the Russian, the son of the Motherland. Her life first of all I will be interested in. I will live with her interests. With her’s dignity I will strengthen mine."

William Crookes

Psychology

1832–1919

"William Crookes : A Victorian Man of Science" by Cyril Norman Hinshelwood"

🇮🇱Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Science

Neo-Kantianism

1903–1994

"The religion of halakhic practice is the religion of life itself."

John Magufuli

Politics

COVID-19 denial

1959–2021

"While reiterating Tanzania's support to the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination, please accept, Your Excellency, the assurances of my highest consideration"

🇬🇧Dorothy Hodgkin

Science

1910–1994

"Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules...were just as experiments suggested?"

🇮🇹Primo Levi

Science

1919–1987

"Primo Levi's Last Moments" by Diego Gambetta in Boston Review"

🇬🇧Oliver Sacks

Science

1933–2015

"In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life."

🇫🇷Pierre Duhem

Science

Positivism

1861–1916

"A physical theory reputed to be satisfactory by the sectarians of one metaphysical school will be rejected by the partisans of another school."

🇺🇸James Franck

Science

1882–1964

"In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor."

🇩🇪Alwin Mittasch

Science

1869–1953

"Chemistry without catalysis would be a sword without a handle, a light without brilliance, a bell without sound."

Baron d'Holbach

Philosophy

atheism

1723–1789

"If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them."

🇦🇹Max Perutz

Science

1914–2002

"Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?"

Justus von Liebig

Education

1803–1873

"The acquisition of a new truth is like the acquisition of a new sense, which renders a man capable and recognizing a large number of phenomena that are hidden from another, as they were from him originally."

John Herschel

Science

1792–1871

"Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue."

🇳🇱Frits Zernike

Science

1888–1966

"How I Discovered Phase Contrast", his Nobel lecture"

🇺🇸Gordon Moore

Science

1929–2023

"With engineering, I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly."

"The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world."

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff

Science

1852–1911

"A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes."

🇺🇸Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Science

b. 1952

"In the current debate about immigration, it is worth noting that this award is yet another example of the numerous contributions that immigrants make to British society."

🇺🇸Clair Cameron Patterson

Science

1922–1995

"I would get up and explain how things really work. That was my job."

🇫🇷Marcellin Berthelot

organic compound

freethought

1827–1907

"In fact, what we are can only be attributed for a small part to our labour and personal individuality, because we owe it almost entirely to our forefathers, both of blood and mind."

🇺🇸Bernard Brodie (military strategist)

Military

1910–1978

"Yet the only empirical data we have about how people conduct war and behave under its stresses is our experience with it in the past, however much we have to make adjustments for subsequent changes in conditions."

🇬🇧Aaron Klug

Science

1926–2018

"People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work."

🇫🇷Marie Curie

Science

1867–1934

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Science

1858–1937

"Bose was the first Indian to be admitted in person to the sanctum sanctorum of English, thus western science."