J. B. S. Haldane Quotes

• My final word, before I’m done, Is ‘Cancer can be rather fun’. Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan The NHS is quite like heaven Provided one confronts the tumour With a sufficient sense of humour. I know that cancer often kills, But so do cars and sleeping pills; And it can hurt one till one sweats, So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.

  J. B. S. Haldane

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• I believe that the scientist is trying to expand absolute truth and the artist absolute beauty, so that I find in art and science, and in an attempt to live a good life, all the religion I want.

  J. B. S. Haldane

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• You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

  J. B. S. Haldane

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• Bad as our urban conditions often are, there is not a slum in the country which has a third of the infantile death-rate of the royal family in the middle ages.

  J. B. S. Haldane

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• Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• There can be no truce between science and religion.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we can imagine.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• I wish I had the voice of Homer to sing of rectal carcinoma.

   

  J. B. S. Haldane

• I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear.

  J. B. S. Haldane

• I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.

  J. B. S. Haldane

J. B. S. Haldane (22)

Birth:	5th November, 1892
Death:	1st December, 1964
Nationality:	Indian
Profession:	Biologist

About

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was born in Oxford, England. He was a British-born Indian Biologist known for his work in the study of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and in mathematics, where he made innovative contributions to the fields of statistics and biostatistics. He earned an MA degree from New College, Oxford University in 1914. Between 1919 and 1922 he was a Fellow of New College, Oxford, where he researched physiology and genetics. He then moved to the University of Cambridge, where he accepted a readership in Biochemistry and taught until 1932. In 1933, he became full Professor of Genetics at University College London. He served as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as a professor at Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta from 1957-64. In 1952, he received the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society.

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