List of John Desmond Bernal Quotes

The Problem [of Specialization] Is Essentially That Of Communications To An Army In Action. After A Rapid Advance Communications Become Disorganized, And There Is A Temporary Halting Until They Are Again In Working Order.

In My Own Field, X-ray Crystallography, We Used To Work Out The Structure Of Minerals By Various Dodges Which We Never Bothered To Write Down, We Just Used Them. Then Linus Pauling Came Along To The Laboratory, Saw What We Were Doing And Wrote Out What We Now Call Pauling's Rules. We Had All Been Using Pauling's Rules For About Three Or Four Years Before Pauling Told Us What The Rules Were.

[in Eighteenth-century Britain] Engineers For The Most Began As Simple Workmen, Skilful And Ambitious But Usually Illiterate And Self-taught. They Were Either Millwrights Like Bramah, Mechanics Like Murdoch And George Stephenson, Or Smiths Like Newcomen And Maudslay.

The Recognition Of The Art That Informs All Pure Science Need Not Mean The Abandonment For It Of All Present Art, Rather It Will Mean The Completion Of The Transformation Of Art That Has Already Begun.

If Science Were Communism, Was It Also Not Possible That Communism Could Itself Become A Science?

A Part Of Sexuality May Go To Research, And A Much Larger Part Must Lead To Aesthetic Creation. The Art Of The Future Will, Because Of The Very Opportunities And Materials It Will Have At Its Command, Need An Infinitely Stronger Formative Impulse Than It Does Now.

Pauling Was Shocked By The Freedom With Which The X-ray Crystallographers Of The Time, Including Particularly Astbury, Played With The Intimate Chemical Structure Of Their Models. They Seemed To Think That If The Atoms Were Arranged In The Right Order And About The Right Distance Apart, That Was All That Mattered, That No Further Restrictions Need To Be Put On Them.

Her [rosalind Franklin] Devotion To Research Showed Itself At Its Finest In The Last Months Of Her Life. Although Stricken With An Illness Which She Knew Would Be Fatal, She Continued To Work Right Up To The End.

We Will Have To Give Up Taking Things For Granted, Even The Apparently Simple Things.

The Only Way Of Learning The Method Of Science Is The Long And Bitter Way Of Personal Experience.

One Of The Questions On Which Clarity Of Thinking Is Now Most Necessary Is That Of The Relation Between The Methods Of Science And Of Marxist Philosophy. Although Much Has Already Been Written On The Subject, Yet There Is Still An Enormous Amount Of Confusion And Contradictory Statement.

The Question Of The Origin Of Life Is Essentially Speculative. We Have To Construct, By Straightforward Thinking On The Basis Of Very Few Factual Observations, A Plausible And Self-consistent Picture Of A Process Which Must Have Occurred Before Any Of The Forms Which Are Known To Us In The Fossil Record Could Have Existed.