A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine! " To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man! . Richard Feynman
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More Quotes By Richard Feynman
  1. Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.
  2. All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't, ' – which is just another way of saying that you can't.
  3. People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain way--in such a way that often nobody believes me!
  4. I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!
  5. — and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them and try to help them out. But pompous fools — guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they...
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