Mark Twain vs. Stephen Jay Gould
Read 20 entries attributed to Mark Twain alongside 20 attributed to Stephen Jay Gould. Compare the wording and topic labels.
This page places 20 entries attributed to Mark Twain alongside 20 attributed to Stephen Jay Gould. Each selection is ordered by stored importance score. These are selections from QuoteLineage, not complete accounts of either author's work.
Topic labels present in both displayed selections: love, life, books. Shared labels do not by themselves demonstrate agreement, disagreement, or influence between the authors.
Attributed to Mark Twain, entry #145: "I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I…"
Attributed to Stephen Jay Gould, entry #222466: "Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, …"
Side-by-Side Comparison
Mark Twain
1835 – 1910
Mark Twain (1835) was an American writer and humorist, author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
"I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfe…"
#Ethics"Brief Biographical Sketch of George Washington", The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867), ed. John Paul"
#Aesthetics"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough."
#Aesthetics"Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience"
#Human Nature"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run."
#Aesthetics"When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain."
#love"After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her."
#love"Ah, it was worth ten years of a man’s life to be dead then! Everything was pleasant. I was in a good neighbourhood, for all the dead people that lived near m…"
#Ethics"He was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie."
#Aesthetics"He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty."
#Aesthetics"I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county."
#Aesthetics": "A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."
#humor"There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not p…"
#life"The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it."
#humor"No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time."
#time"None but an ass pays a compliment and asks a favor at the same time. There are many asses."
#time"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
#books"Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed."
#ethics"I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a divi…"
#humor"NOTICE. To the next Burglar. There is nothing but plated ware in this house, now and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing in the dining room over…"
#mindStephen Jay Gould
1941 – 2002
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, historian of science, and one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
"Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only fro…"
#leadership"All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. Bu…"
#nature"Few intellectual tyrannies can be more recalcitrant than the truths that everybody knows and nearly no one can defend with any decent data . And few intellec…"
#knowledge"If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would sur…"
#creativity"The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic d…"
#life"He confronts a basic tool of the measurers—the statistical technique called factor analysis, developed by the influential English psychologist Charles Spearm…"
#philosophy"Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck…"
#philosophy"In his anti-Darwinian book... , Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanat…"
#justice"I first met Stephen Jay Gould in the sixth grade in Queens, New York, when we were the only two geeks in the school interested in natural history and particu…"
#writing"Bowing to the reality of harried lives, Rudwick recognizes that not everyone will read every word of the meaty second section; he even explicitly gives us pe…"
#books"f texts are unified by a central logic of argument, then their pictorial illustrations are integral to the ensemble, not pretty little trifles included only …"
#philosophy"The problem may be briefly stated: What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people, without training in st…"
#death"The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. Th…"
#life"Later evolutionary theorists of linear progress had to advance the overtly physical and historical claim that an ancestral lineage of arthropods actually tur…"
#art"I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to …"
#knowledge"The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive"
#history"In this crucial sense, the theory of punctuated equilibrium adopts a very conservative position. The theory asserts no novel claim about modes or mechanisms …"
#philosophy"Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—…"
#love"Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he i…"
#love"But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measur…"
#truth