share quotes

speakers, I’m not sure I’ll find more. If I do, I’ll re-establish this as a goal.

jkd

“It’s great to be great, but its greater to be human.”

“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”

“An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh.”

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

“You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”

I got this from his website:

No matter how strange you are, there’s something unique in you. Something that not only makes you happy, but makes the rest of us feel happy that we don’t have to be you and do what you are doing!” – ADG

These are the one-liners that my dad used at Cal-Tech over a period of over 40 years. They may sound familiar, some of these were published as “Kleinisms,” Amazing Stories Magazine, 1985-7.

When all else fails, go back to Newton.

The pilot’s right arm is the only reliable power supply in an airplane.

If you try to do something fancy, you will generally fall flat on your face.

Plastic materials make good toothbrush handles.

In an airplane you must have something to hang onto all the time.

50% of designers have no reason at all for design decisions.

A sensible enginner is not an inventor.

Engineers tend to forget the laws of Physics.

The only person in the airplane more nervous than a pilot is an engineer.

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something,” Einstein once said, “wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

Microsoft has beaten Volkswagen. Volkswagen only made 22 million bugs.

The Americans will always do the right thing… After they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.

It’s no use saying, ’’We are doing our best.’’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

“Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution - these can lift at a colossal humbug - push it a little—weaken it a little over the course of a century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

“The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug,”

“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”

“It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

“When in doubt, tell the truth.”

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

“I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”

“If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them—you can’t help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there’s your book all finished up and never cost you an idea.”