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Smithsonian Quotes

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Smithsonian Quotes

“Asch took from his bankruptcy an important lesson: he decided that he never wanted to record another hit record. In early 1949, he commented to an unnamed writer from People’s Songs (the newsletter of left-wing folk music) that he had “focused too much time and money on popular jazz” and from this point forward he would focus on “good records,” which would be “sold to a small circle of people who will buy them.”

MusicJazzLabelsPop MusicFolkSmithsonianAsch
Book:Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways
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“Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity. [Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]”

LifeScienceHumanityLiteratureMoralKnowledgeProgressCivilizationIntellectImprovementPursuitLiberalModern CivilizationSmithsonianMoral ProgressSmithsonian InstituteJames SmithsonJoseph HenrySmithsonSmithsonian Institution
Author:Joseph Henry
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“The telescope, in enabling us to look far out into space, also allows us to look back in time. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When we look up into the daylight sky, we are not seeing the sun as it currently is but as it was about eight minutes ago, since it takes that long for the light radiating from this familiar star to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Similarly, when the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) receives light waves from the depths of the universe, those waves will have originated from points as far as 76 sextillion (76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away. It will have taken those waves some 13 billion years to arrive on earth, meaning they left their source about a million years after the big bang, and roughly nine to ten years before Earth even formed.”

Big BangSpeed Of LightSmithsonianGiant Magellan TelescopeGmtLas Campanas Peak ChileSkywatching
Book:The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects
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“As I conceptualized the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I knew it had to fulfill Mamie Mobley's charge: to be a place that carried the burden of history and the weight of memory, regardless of how painful or difficult it was. At the core of the museum, therefore, would be a commitment to remember.”

HistoryMemoryPainful MemoriesSmithsonian
Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
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“The public space of the museum is not my favorite, loud and full of tourists and school groups and hungry hordes. Their curiosity is endearing---they're acolytes for the natural world. And the marble gleams with architectural detail and precious objects all around. But on these, my gray days, entering the building carries the weight of death: all the specimens, thousands of carcasses of every species, stuffed or otherwise retrieved from oblivion so we can know them, yet all dead. The birds I draw and paint, all dead. On these days, my only defense is to imagine every pinned butterfly taking wing, every stuffed marsupial waking up, every preserved plant specimen blooming and carpeting the marble floor like a time-lapse forest, and every bird coming to life, flying up to the dome and away. On the days when the fog comes and hooks into my gut like a sharp-toothed parasite, these visions can save me. The steadier, more consistent salvation, of course, is the work. I can lose myself for hours drawing, for instance, the common loon, with its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings. With the right precision, I can bring the deadness of a bird skin to a striking facsimile of life.”

ArtistLife And DeathMuseumSmithsonianOrnithologyField Of Study
Book:The Marsh Queen
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“Delores, the Wise Woman of Botany, told me while I was in Washington that every seven years, employees of my pay grade are entitled to a sabbatical, and I'm two years late in taking mine. She helped me fill out the form. I listed my purpose: "to study the birds of the southeastern United States with an emphasis on the marshlands of Florida." Hugh Adamson sputtered an objection, but he couldn't do a thing. Apparently, the sabbatical is a long-standing Smithsonian policy that would actually take an Act of Congress to reverse. I didn't write on the form of my other intention: to freelance, get my name out there, and see whether Florida is where I belong.”

PolicyEntitledPurpose In LifeSmithsonianSabbaticalOrnithology
Book:The Marsh Queen
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“Perhaps the worst example of Smithsonian contempt for Jesus Christ is seen in its 1994 publication of a coffee-table book entitled Smithsonian Time Lines of the Ancient World ... This flagrant display of religious bigotry and discrimination in a book officially sponsored by the Smithsonian is intellectually and academically dishonest.”

WorldBookChristianJesusChristReligiousLinesWorstExampleJesus ChristTablesAncientCoffeeDiscriminationBigotryContemptDisplayEntitledPublicationAncient WorldReligious BigotrySmithsonian
Author:Tim LaHaye
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“The mind is a vagrant thing ... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time. Answering criticism that the book for which he won a Pulitzer Prize was written in the years he had been employed at the Smithsonian. He specified that did not write on the premises there, but only at home outside of working hours.”

ThinkingWritingYearsMindPersonsBookHomeScienceHoursCompanyWrittenCriticismInventionPrizeEmployedLaboratoryPremisesVagrantsSmithsonian
Author:Daniel J. Boorstin
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“It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.”

IfsYearsPastThreeMillionsTakenFourCenturyThousandDirectorsTenGardenPlantHistoricalRateListsEmploymentThirtyQuartersThousand YearsInsectsInstituteBiologistSmithsonian
Author:Richard Leakey
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“By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage.”

YearsHas BeensFoundHoursSunRecordsFeetCenturyPeriodsEvidenceHistoricalRateObservationDataConsistentMathematicianBostonHarvardDiggingEclipseAnalyzingCorrespondingAstrophysicsBouldersContractingGreenwichSmithsonianDigging DeepShrinkage
Author:Jonathan Sarfati
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