Top 14 Jonathan Miller Quotes

Now, that is in a way also what scientists are trying to do they’re trying to get people to see that the world can be represented in an alternative way and that it’s right.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

People are already self-selected by the time they’ve decided to become scientists.

I wasn’t driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.

It’s not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people’s costumes and pretending to be people that they’re not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?

The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you’ve got to go on the experience of the avant garde.

What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence.

What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist.

I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn’t make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

The thing about science is that it’s an accurate picture of the world.

I’m not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.

A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.

People can’t draw now and don’t feel it’s necessary. Art students don’t seem to want to draw.

I’m not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.