Top 60 John B. S. Haldane Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles.”

— John B. S. Haldane

2. “The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.”

— John B. S. Haldane

3. “I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.”

— John B. S. Haldane

4. “Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination.”

— John B. S. Haldane

5. “This is my prediction for the future: Whatever hasn’t happened will happen, and no one will be safe from it.”

— John B. S. Haldane

6. “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

— John B. S. Haldane

7. “I will jump into the river to save two brothers or eight cousins.”

— John B. S. Haldane

8. “I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don’t know why I do things.”

— John B. S. Haldane

9. “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.”

— John B. S. Haldane

10. “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

— John B. S. Haldane

11. “Now, if the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the cooperation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.”

— John B. S. Haldane

12. “The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.”

— John B. S. Haldane

13. “The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides.”

— John B. S. Haldane

14. “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.”

— John B. S. Haldane

15. “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

— John B. S. Haldane

16. “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.”

— John B. S. Haldane

17. “An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.”

— John B. S. Haldane

18. “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.”

— John B. S. Haldane

19. “Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.”

— John B. S. Haldane

20. “You can analyze a glass of water and you’re left with a lot of chemical components, but nothing you can drink.”

— John B. S. Haldane

21. “A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.”

— John B. S. Haldane

22. “Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge.”

— John B. S. Haldane

23. “We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.”

— John B. S. Haldane

24. “There can be no truce between science and religion.”

— John B. S. Haldane

25. “It wasn’t until I had performed by first autopsy that I realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them in my imagination.”

— John B. S. Haldane

26. “I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.”

— John B. S. Haldane

27. “While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.”

— John B. S. Haldane

28. “So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.”

— John B. S. Haldane

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

— John B. S. Haldane

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

— John B. S. Haldane

31. “Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.”

— John B. S. Haldane

32. “An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.”

— John B. S. Haldane

33. “Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.”

— John B. S. Haldane

34. “Einstein – the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein’s name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.”

— John B. S. Haldane

35. “There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.”

— John B. S. Haldane

36. “Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. “What inference,” asked the latter, “might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?” Haldane replied: “An inordinate fondness for beetles.””

— John B. S. Haldane

37. “I do not believe in the commercial possibility of induced radioactivity.”

— John B. S. Haldane

38. “The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.”

— John B. S. Haldane

39. “If materialism is true, it seems to me that we cannot know that it is true. If my opinions are the result of the chemical processes going on in my brain, they are determined by the laws of chemistry, not those of logic.”

— John B. S. Haldane

40. “The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.”

— John B. S. Haldane

41. “The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles.”

— John B. S. Haldane

42. “To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful of energy as to burn down ones house to roast one’s pork.”

— John B. S. Haldane

43. “There are 400,000 species of beetles on this planet, but only 8,000 species of mammals.”

— John B. S. Haldane

44. “Man’s habits change more rapidly than his instincts.”

— John B. S. Haldane

45. “It was a reaction from the old idea of “protoplasm”, a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.”

— John B. S. Haldane

46. “Until politics are a branch of science, we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”

— John B. S. Haldane

47. “Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table.”

— John B. S. Haldane

48. “Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.”

— John B. S. Haldane

49. “Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.”

— John B. S. Haldane

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

— John B. S. Haldane