Erwin Chargaff

“One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, the reality they are supposed to represent.”

“What is a scientist? He is a man who makes mistakes. But they are new mistakes, and that is how science progresses.”

“We have built a veritable Tower of Babel, not a temple of worship but a laboratory of research; not a place of prayer but a workshop of wonder; not a dwelling of gods but a factory of man.”

“A scientist without a sense of history is like a man without a memory.”

“If you don't have a plan, you can't have a failure.”

“It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth.”

“I feel that I have been a passenger on a train that has been going in the wrong direction.”

“The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.”

“The technology of abbreviation is the enemy of insight.”

“Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.”

“Anyone who desires to be a scientist should not enter the field.”

“I have the impression that I have been condemned to a life of hard labor, and I have not even been told what my crime is.”

“The assumption of universal laws of nature is a logical consequence of the assumption of one God.”

“The future is the past, which is to say it has no future.”