“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” R. Buckminster Fuller

“The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceive ideas. It continues to surprise us.” Stephen Hawking

“Our acts are attached to us, as its glimmer is attached to phosphorous. They consume us, it is true, but they make our splendor.” André Gide 

“All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to and living with all the rest.” Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“People should be encouraged, as an individual, to go and find out for themselves. Wherever you are, wherever you can, you should research things on your own, you should research things that you’ve been told or thought. And once you’re in that line set, and you really become an active learner as an individual, then all the things open up to you.”

“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances. Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specialization’s and leave it to others—primarily to the politicians—to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas.

(…) I feel that one of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness.

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable-techno-economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of warfaring.

All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever expending inventory of experiences. Children are enthusiastic planetarium audiences. Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.

One of humanity’s prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs. If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.

What nature needed man to be was adaptive in many if not any direction; wherefore she gave man a mind as well as a coordinating switchboard brain.” Buckminster Fuller

“It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true.” Freeman Dyson

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor." Elon Musk

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change." Charles Darwin

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.” Albert Einstein

“Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world. I’ve been in love with science, so it seems the most natural thing in the world to tell people about it.” Carl Sagan

“A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.” Jacob Bronowski

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.” Henri Poincaré

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.” Stephen Hawking