When the man who knows all about the fruit fly chromosomes finds himself sitting next to an authority on Beowulf, there may be an uneasy silence.

- Brand Blanshard

If science could get rid of consciousness, it would have disposed of the only stumbling block to its universal application.

- Brand Blanshard

[How to think about a problem:] The first step is to make the problem specific . . . ; The second step is to form theories freely of how to rid yours…

- Brand Blanshard

Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.

- Brand Blanshard

I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly …

- Brand Blanshard

Most men live like raisins in a cake of custom.

- Brand Blanshard

Custom calls me to 't: What custom wills, in all things should we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too high…

- Brand Blanshard

To think at its best is to find oneself carried down the current of necessity.

- Brand Blanshard

Once the anchor of reason has been cut, ones craft may go anywhere. One may become a St Francis or equally a Hitler.

- Brand Blanshard