Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian physicist and chemist who was a pioneer of electricity and power and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the president of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta’s invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement and led others to conduct similar experiments, which eventually led to the development of the field of electrochemistry.

Alessandro Volta Quotes

1. “God is as real as a station wagon.
— Alessandro Volta

2. “The lack of diversity in higher education is a problem we as a country must tackle if we’re going to live up to our promise.”
— Alessandro Volta

3. “The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You’re sleepless, you’re anxious, you’re fat, you’re depressed – and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale, and drink lots of water. It didn’t help.”
— Alessandro Volta

4. “What is it possible to do well, in physics particularly, if things are not reduced to degrees and measures?”
— Alessandro Volta

5. “I’m fine, considering I can’t walk anymore,” Pam replied, a sarcastic edge in her voice. “You look like your bringing news. What is it this time, I’m blind?”
— Alessandro Volta

6. “I couldn’t believe I’d come all this way and suffered so much only to lose Bianca to some eternal girls’ club.”
— Alessandro Volta

7. “Things can change in a day.”
— Alessandro Volta

8. “People are not fat and sick because they choose to eat conventionally produced produce over organic. It’s because they are not eating fruits and vegetables.”
— Alessandro Volta

9. “Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop.”
— Alessandro Volta

10. “Everyone is a creative agent … The tools are your imagination and your imagination is limitless.”
— Alessandro Volta

11. “Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel when I’m around you: confused, but still satisfied.’ I freeze, trying to figure out how to cancel it out and replace it with something that sounds a whole lot less like sex and a candy bar ad.”
— Alessandro Volta

12. “Hate is also creative: it creates more hate.”
— Alessandro Volta

13. “The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination – not vice versa.”
— Alessandro Volta

14. “You will have given another moment to the moment you are living and to the moments you are going to live; you have perverted time; you have opened a forbidden field to what happened to you before.”
— Alessandro Volta

15. “She wanted to be alone – to think things out – to adjust herself, if it were possible, to the new world in which she seemed to have been transplanted with a suddenness and completeness that left her half bewildered to her own identity.”
— Alessandro Volta

16. “Punishing the devil is a dangerous business.”
— Alessandro Volta

17. “I have raised beds, perennial beds, cut flower beds. I have an island on a pond that’s just covered in peonies. I have an herb garden, tons of vegetables, raspberries. I have everything. I’m a green guy.”
— Alessandro Volta

18. “Each metal has a certain power, which is different from metal to metal, of setting the electric fluid in motion …”
— Alessandro Volta

19. “You must be ready to give up even the most attractive ideas when experiment shows them to be wrong.”
— Alessandro Volta