Max Planck, 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics:
“New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organised, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.”
(Source: Max Planck, Address on the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, January 1936. Quoted in Kristie Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 1993.)