We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), ‘Notebooks’.
The busy writer, the busy teacher, any communicator of science needs a work like this, to find quotes like that one. It is a treasury of science which offers you quick access to around 1700 pithy and amusing quotations adding up to about 115,000 words, across all of the sciences and mathematics.
Here, you will find verse, text from plays, novels, letters, speeches and short stories, but mainly from the hands of the scientists themselves, the people who shaped science. The chapters are set out in alphabetical order, but within the chapters, a great deal of effort has gone into apposite juxtaposition, allowing the authors to argue at times.
The chapters are: Biology, Communication and senses, Disease, Earth and space, Ecology, Energy, Evolution, Knowledge, Mathematics, Matter, Physics, Politics, Science and Transport.
The e-book is designed for browsing, and to that end, there is a comprehensive set of hot-links that allow you to drill down to the area of interest: aside from that, use your search function.
Once you have skimmed this, when the time comes when you need to use this famous exchange:
“I wish I’d said that…” followed by “You will, Oscar, you will.”, all you have to do is apply the search function!
This collection was assembled as the commonplace book of a now somewhat ancient science writer who has, over the years, used many of these quotations, though others are as yet waiting their moment. The collector anticipates being Collected in the next dozen years or so, and plans, ere then, to enjoy advanced middle age, which means slowing down on the writing front.
Because I would rather share these fruits with others in my profession, I am releasing all of my working files as e-books, and this is one of a set of three volumes that may be bought separately, or together in an omnibus volume, called ‘Not Your Usual Sources’, which is #6 in the Not Your Usual series, already available.
So you have a choice of the three separate volumes:
‘Not Your Usual Anthology of Verse’ (often-quoted English verse, #7);
This one: ‘Not Your Usual Science Quotations’ (a treasury of science for writers, #8); and
‘Not Your Usual Australian Vignettes’ (Australian history quotes, #9).
Or you can opt to take up:
‘Not Your Usual Sources’, (an epigraph mine/dictionary of quotations/verse collection, #6), which will represent a major saving, because I want to encourage people to reach out beyond their comfort zone.
![Not Your Usual Science Quotations by [Peter Macinnis]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51rDQvi4MbL._SY346_.jpg)
