Ed Wiebe

Gottfried Leibniz:

We may give final praise to the machine ... It will be desirable to all who are engaged in computations ... For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculations.

Carl Sagan:

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

No contemporary religion and no New Age belief seems to me to take sufficient account of the grandeur, magnificence, subtlety and intricacy of the Universe revealed by science.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote (1513) ...

I shall do some experiments before I proceed farther because my intention is to cite experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way. And this is the true rule by which those who speculate about the effects of nature must proceed.

Michael Faraday wrote ...

Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such constancy. -- 19 March 1849

Richard Hamming (may have) said ...

Machines should work. People should think.

I'll dare to add that perhaps soon machines will think and people will do nothing. Also,

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Richard Feynman once wrote ...

To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.

Lewis Fry Richardson wrote ...

Einstein has somewhere remarked that he was guided towards his discoveries partly by the notion that the important laws of physics were really simple. R. H. Fowler has been heard to remark that, of two formulae the more elegant is likely to be true. Dirac very recently sought an explanation alternative to that of the spin in the electron because he felt that Nature could not have arranged things in such a complicated way ... If they would condescend to attend to meteorology the subject might be greatly enriched. But I suspect they would have to abandon the idea that the truth is really simple.

According to Jonathan Swift I am a genius ...

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Woody Guthrie described the music made by hobos in the Great Depression ...

"Kill it. I done had my tankful," I told him, and heard the bubbles play a little song that quit when the wine was all downed.