There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.
1920, Prejudices: Second Series by H. L. Mencken (Henry Louis Mencken), Chapter 4: The Divine Afflatus, Start Page 155, Borzoi: Alfred A. Knopf, New York.(but often attributed to othere as well)
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
[Often paraphrased as "Science progresses one funeral at a time".]
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. New York: Philosophical library, 1950, p. 33, 97
Be excellent to each other, and party on!
The Puritan ethic is the constant fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.
An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
Said to Wolfgang Pauli after his presentation of Heisenberg's and Pauli's nonlinear field theory of elementary particles, at Columbia University (1958), as reported by F. J. Dyson in his paper "Innovation in Physics"
I still have objections to the … beauty of quantum mechanics, but she is correct.
I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
Interview on NPR's Morning Edition, May 25, 2001
You have to have a heart to have an attack
Said of Peter Sellers who suffered 8 heart attacks when he inhaled amyl nitrites (poppers) as a sexual stimulant
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
