“You have had your last bad meal. But, you have also heard your last honest compliment, and you have lost your last true friend.”

At no period of [Michael Faraday’s] unmatched career was he interested in utility.

The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings.

We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions .

The more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare, but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest

The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships-a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history.

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent or self-satisfied; they are, if sound

Unintelligence could go no further! … In Great Britain, the situation is similar. … Until the figures are reversed, … nations deceive themselves as to what they care about most.

Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity, and the less they are deflected by the consideration of immediacy of application

The spearhead of progress. If they are fundamentally wrong, free discussion will in time put an end to them.

The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.

The world in which we live is the only world about which our senses can testify.

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education.

No nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

As far as he cared, the question of utility was never raised.

Mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.

A patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.