Smithsonian Quotes

I wouldn't be surprised if some day, they put the Simpsons in the Smithsonian. It's become part of our culture, those characters.

If I had been at a University I don't think I would have been able to have the experience I had in my Smithsonian work. I don't think I have been as successful

I've got a portrait in the Smithsonian. Who ever thought that would happen?

If I had to pick three of my favorite magazines, they would be 'Fast Company', 'Silicon India', and 'Smithsonian.'

Ask any guy if sex is important in a relationship and the one who says no is lying. I just haven't met that guy yet. When you meet him, let's get him in to the Smithsonian - he's that special and rare.

There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American

The Smithsonian museums are among this country's most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of art.

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.

Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.

I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975.

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life

As a regent, I hope to bring that important perspective of a typical family visitor in combination with my background as a Member of Congress and a proponent of the Smithsonian's efforts to reach all Americans.

I have taught history on the high school and college levels, and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian, The National Institutes of Health, and numerous colleges and universities, mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.

Imagine foreign troops sitting idly, laughing as hooligans trashed the Smithsonian, stole the gold from Fort Knox and burned down the Department of the Interior. That was us in Iraq.

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn't make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.

I've always wanted to visit [Washington]. The Smithsonian has some fantastic archival material on blues music, which I'm really into. There's a ton of stuff I want to do there. but it just never happened.

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.

Sometimes when I'm swimming, I think that maybe someday I'll put my red Speedo up for auction. Or maybe I'll donate it to the Smithsonian. They can stuff it with two plums and a gherkin and put it on display.

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.

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.

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.

The Smithsonian Institute is one of the most popular agencies of government in the United States.

The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival.