With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.
— Frederick Soddy
There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth.
Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation.
Nature is in austere mood, even terrifying, withal majestically beautiful.
In the first place, the preparation of the Nobel lecture which I am to give has shown me, even more clearly than I knew before, how many others share with me, often, indeed, have anticipated me, in the discoveries for which you have awarded me the prize.
An honest money system is the only alternative.
To-day it appears as though it may well be altogether abolished in the future as it has to some extent been mitigated in the past by the unceasing, and as it now appears, unlimited ascent of man to knowledge, and through knowledge to physical power and dominion over Nature.
The whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today.
On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries.
Man cannot influence in this respect the atomic forces of Nature.
Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it.
There is something sublime about its aloofness from and its indifference to its external environment.
The pure air and dazzling snow belong to things beyond the reach of all personal feeling, almost beyond the reach of life. Yet such things are a part of our life, neither the least noble nor the most terrible.
Now whatever the origin of this apparently meaningless jumble of ideas may have been, it is really a perfect and very slightly allegorical expression of the actual present views we hold today.
It is curious to reflect, for example, upon the remarkable legend of the Philosopher's Stone, one of the oldest and most universal beliefs, the origin of which, however far back we penetrate into the records of the past, we do not probably trace its real source.
But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.
