Quotes
Quotes
Regarding Soil
"The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all."
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977
"Probably more harm has been done to the science by the almost universal attempts to look upon the soil merely as a producer of crops rather than as a natural body worth in and for itself of all the study that can be devoted to it, than most men realize."
C. F. Marbut, 1920
"To be a successful farmer one must first know the nature of the soil."
Xenophon, The Oeconomicus, ~400 B.C.
"First the grain, and then the blade
The one destroyed, the other made;
Then stalk and blossom, and again
The gold of newly minted grain.
So life, by death the reaper cast
To earth, again shall rise at last;
For 'tis the service of the sod
To render God the things of God."
John Banister Tabb; Life, Death, and Similar Themes: The World; 1892
More at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Soil
Regarding Science
"It is therefore natural to expect that the knowledge of physical science obtained by the combined use of mathematical analysis and experimental research will be of a more solid, available, and enduring kind than that possessed by the mere mathematician or the mere experimenter."
James Clerk Maxwell. "Five of Maxwell's Papers", Project Gutenberg eBook, p. 18
"Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world."
Michael Crichton, Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003
"Statisticians classically asked the wrong question--and were willing to answer with a lie, one that was often a downright lie. They asked 'Are the effects of A and B different?' and they were willing to answer 'no'. All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different--in some decimal place--for any A and B. Thus asking 'Are the effects different?' is foolish."
John W. Tukey, 1991. The philosophy of multiple comparisons. Statistical Science 6:100-116.
Regarding People
"A community will reduce its risk...when a trusted peer shows that the community's risk is unacceptably large...and demonstrates an affordable, socially acceptable, and verifiable method to reduce that risk."
Brian Tucker, quoted in "What can we learn about disaster preparedness from Nepal's Quake", by Randy Showstack, 2015. Eos 96(10):10-14.
