Quotes from John 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.

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.

A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.

If human beings could be propagated by cutting, like apple trees, aristocracy would be biologically sound.

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

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

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

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

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

An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.

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.

And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.

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