quotations about science
O star-eyed Science, hast thou wander'd there,
To waft us home the message of despair?
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Pleasures of Hope
Science is truth for life
Watch religion fall obsolete
Science Will be truth for life
Technology as nature
10,000 MANIACS
"Planned Obsolescence"
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Adding a Dimension
Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it -- you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
Science is a subordinate category. When science offers itself as the final stage or form of knowing, it is guilty of a false quantity, in that it puts the accent, which belongs elsewhere, upon the penultimate.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.
JEAN ROSTAND
The Substance of Men
Understanding science is necessary to make informed decisions on issues both private and public -- from individual health care to national defense.
JOHN DURANT
"John Durant plans a new era for the MIT Museum", MIT News, September 27, 2017
Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
"On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences", Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews
Every science owns kin with its sister science.
HYPATIA
attributed, Day's Collacon
I consider it an error in scientific communication that, most of the time, merely the polished and flawless results of natural research are displayed, as in an art show. And exhibit of the finished product alone has many drawbacks and dangers for both its creator and its users. The creator of the product will be only too ready to demonstrate perfection and flawlessness while concealing gaps, uncertainties and discordant contradictions of his insight into nature. He thus belittles the meaning of the real process of natural research. The user of the product will not appreciate the rigorous demands made on the natural scientist when the latter has to reveal and describe the secrets of nature in a practical way. He will never learn to think for himself and to cope by himself.
WILHELM REICH
Ether, God and Devil
It was good that there should be a more diffused knowledge of the material world; and it was good, therefore, that there should be partisans of matter, believers in particles, zealots for tissue, who were ready to incur any odium and any labour that a few more men might learn a few more things.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Biographical Studies
Science is not the total answer; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World As I See It
All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out of My Later Years
In the history of science and throughout the whole course of its progress we see certain epochs following one another more or less rapidly. Some important view is expressed, it may be original or only revived; sooner or later it receives recognition; fellow workers spring up; the outcome of it finds its way into the schools; it is taught and handed down; and we observe, unhappily, that it does not in the least matter whether the view be true or false. In either case its course is the same; in either case it comes in the end to be a mere phrase, a lifeless word stamped on the memory.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
EDWIN H. LAND
attributed, QFINANCE: The Ultimate Resource
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
CARL SAGAN
Keynote address to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, 1987