“There were a lot of fools at that conference – pompus fools – and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary foolks are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompus fools – guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”
:Richard Feynman in Is Electricity Fire? in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.
“There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read – something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail or it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until I finally said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.
So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The invidivual member of the social community often received his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People Read.”
:Richard Feynman in Is Electricity Fire? in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.
“I understood at last what art really is for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they’re depressed, or they’re happy, on account of that damn thing you made.”
:Richard Feynman in Is It Art? in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.
“You know the story about the donkey who is standing exactly in the middle of two piles of hay, and doesn’t go to either one, because it’s balanced? Well, that’s nothing. Cornell and Caltech started making me offers, and as soon as I would move, figuring that Caltech was really better, they would up their offer at Cornell; and when I thought I’d stay at Cornell, they’d up something at Caltech. So you can imagine this donkey between the two piles of hay, with the extra complication that as soon as he moves toward one the other one gets higher. That makes it very difficult!”
:Richard Feynman in An Offer You Must Refuse in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.
“It turned out that this hotel was the one that the airline pilots and the stewardesses from Pan American Airlines stayed at when they would “lay over” — a term that always bothered me a little bit.
:Richard Feynman in O Americano, Outra Vez! in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. Interesting observation. So *that*’s what a lay-over is supposed to be!
