Science Quote by Paul D. Boyer

Self-portrait by way of understatement: Boyer frames anger not as drama but as data. "I am told" is doing sly work here. It distances the adult scientist from the child’s emotion, outsourcing the diagnosis to witnesses, as if temperament were a measurement taken by someone else. That move feels almost laboratory-clean, the beginning of a case study in which the subject happens to be himself.

Then comes the image: banishment to the back hall. It’s domestic and architectural, a small exile in the geography of manners. Not a beating, not a sermon - a quiet quarantine until "civility returned", as if politeness were a weather system that rolls back in. The phrasing is gently comic, but it’s also disciplinary: emotion is treated as a temporary malfunction, and reintegration is contingent on performing social control. That’s a family’s moral technology in miniature, training a child to understand that membership has terms.

For a 20th-century scientist, the subtext lands as origin story. The temperament that got him sent away is acknowledged, but sanded down into a respectable narrative of self-regulation. It hints at the cultural bargain many high achievers were taught: intensity is permitted only if it can be translated into productivity and politeness. Boyer doesn’t claim he was wrongly punished or proudly unruly; he remembers the rule, and the rule worked. The line reads like a calibration of the self - the making of a mind that will later prize control, method, and the ability to return to the room looking composed.