The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
— Christine Quinn
Viral Madame Curie quotations
Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.
It's in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie's birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That's why I like Charlie Parker.
Gertrude Stein ... the Madame Curie of language. Because in her deep research she has crushed thousands of tons of matter to extract the radium of the word.
In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.
We Americans are mildly interested, of course, in reading about the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, but what we really yearn to know is the name of the uncommemorated French female who first mixed a sauce bearnaise.
When you talk to young girls these days about their role modles, very few mention a chemist like Madame Curie or an astrophysicist and astronaut like Sally Ride, or a zoologist like Jane Goodall. Instead, they look to someone like Madonna.
Madame Curie didn't stumble upon radium by accident.
She searched and experimented and sweated and suffered years before she found it. Success rarely is an accident.
When I talk about the pain and hardship of a scientist's life, I'm speaking of more than existential angst. Galileo's work was condemned by the Church; Madame Curie paid with her life, a victim of leukemia wrought by radiation poisoning. Too many of us develop cataracts. None of us gets enough sleep. Most of what we know about the universe we know thanks to a lot of guys (and ladies) who stayed up late at night.