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Any living cell carries with it the experiences of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors. You cannot expect to explain so wise an old bird in a few simple words.

— Max Delbrück

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More quotes by Max Delbrück

The particular thing about science is to combine that [the dreams of obtaining power] with a retreat from the world. Other people want to obtain power by going out into the world, but the scientist really wants to obtain power by retreating from the world.

Interview with Max Delbruck (1978)

If you're too sloppy, then you never get reproducible results, and then you never can draw any conclusions; but if you are just a little sloppy, then when you see something startling, (...) you nail it down (...). So I called it the "Principle of Limited Sloppiness".

Interview with Max Delbruck (1978)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Max Delbrück (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.