The rose does not bloom without thorns. True, but would that the thorns did not outlive the rose.

My main point today is that usually one gets what one expects, but very rarely in the way one expected it.

If one introduces the concept of energy of an earthquake then that is a theoretically derived quantity.

As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.

The most remarkable feature about the magnitude scale was that it worked at all and that it could be extended on a worldwide basis. It was originally envisaged as a rather rough-and-ready procedure by which we could grade earthquakes. We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.

Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.

Remembrance is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away.