Martin Lewis Perl Quotes
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Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.
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There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.
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My parents were determined to move into the middle class.
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About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.
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They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.
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Common elements of creativity are originality and imagination. Creativity is intertwined with the freedom to design, to invent and to dream. In engineering and science a creative idea is useful only if it meets three conditions: the constraint of the natural laws, the constraint of cost, and the constraint of technical feasibility.
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A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.
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I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.
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I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.
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The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.
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My parents regarded school teachers as higher beings, as did many immigrants.
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As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.
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It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.
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I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.
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Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.
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Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.
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Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.
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Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.
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Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.
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This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.