SCIENCE QUOTES V

quotations about science

Better for science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to go where she will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired out at so much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those who guide the many.

CHARLES KINGSLEY

"Soldiers of Science", The Works of Charles Kingsley


Scientists are supposed to be dispassionate, cool-headed, and unemotional when they evaluate their data. But it's hard for me to avoid a sense of awe when I'm hunting fossils.

ROBERT T. BAKKER

Raptor Red

Tags: Robert T. Bakker


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

Tags: Isaac Asimov


Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

CHARLES DARWIN

The Descent of Man

Tags: Charles Darwin


Human laws change, but science is divine, and its laws are eternal.

ALPHONSO X

attributed, Day's Collacon


Science is truth for life
Watch religion fall obsolete
Science Will be truth for life
Technology as nature

10,000 MANIACS

"Planned Obsolescence"


Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.

JEAN ROSTAND

The Substance of Men

Tags: Jean Rostand


Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. In war it serves that we may poison and mutilate each other. In peace it has made our lives hurried and uncertain. Instead of freeing us in great measure from spiritually exhausting labor, it has made men into slaves of machinery, who for the most part complete their monotonous long day's work with disgust and must continually tremble for their poor rations. ... It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man's blessings. Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours; concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

speech at California Institute of Technology, The New York Times, February 16, 1931

Tags: Albert Einstein


O star-eyed Science, hast thou wander'd there,
To waft us home the message of despair?

THOMAS CAMPBELL

Pleasures of Hope

Tags: Thomas Campbell


I'd like to think by the end of the show, you have warmed up to what science is. It's not just some class you took in school and you forget about after you sell back the textbook. You recognize that science is everywhere -- it touches us at all times.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

"Neil DeGrasse Tyson Says Science Isn't Dead -- And You're The One Who's Saving It", Good Education, September 29, 2017


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


The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know--it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays


Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking and it's an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it. I think once we stop asking questions like "what is the age of the universe," or "how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level," once we stop asking questions like that, we're dead.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

"An Interview with Dr. Alan Lightman: At the Intersection of the Sciences and Humanities", aegis, spring 2006

Tags: Alan Lightman


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

Tags: Tobias Wolff


Science admires and bows to nature.

PAWEL STRZELECKI

attributed, Day's Collacon


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

Tags: Nicholas Murray Butler


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

Tags: Carl Sagan


Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge--the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.

LISA RANDALL

Knocking on Heaven's Door

Tags: Lisa Randall


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


Leave your faith in science's hands
Research might lead to your salvation
While you're in a state of suspended animation

PESTILENCE

"Suspended Animation"