73 Quotes by Murray Gell-Mann

I think one can try to reduce the amount of confusion, and also to reduce the amount of nonsense that's talked about quantum mechanics.

Is it imaginable that in the 13 or 14 billion years before human life appeared there was no quantum mechanics? That is ludicrous.

The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.

Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off.

One thing that makes the adventure of working in our field particularly rewarding, especially in attempting to improve the theory, is that... a chief criterion for the selection of a correct hypothesis... seems to be the criterion of beauty, simplicity, or elegance.

My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?

Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.

Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.

The persistence of erroneous beliefs exacerbates the widespread anachronistic failure to recognize the urgent problems that face humanity on this planet.