Science
- Above, far above the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable, they are the expression of the creative power they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be. Man can come to understand the: he is incapable of changing them.--Vilfredo Pareto (Cours d'economie Politique)
- After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.--Albert Einstein (in the Durban Morning Herald, 8/21/55)
- ... all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike--yet it is the most precious thing we have.--Albert Einstein ("Glimpses of Einstein" The Physics Teacher, April 1974)
- The antagonism between science and religion is real only to those who take a narrow view of both, the perfect battle for bigots from both camps.--George Zebrowski
- Astronomers work always with the past; because light takes time to move from one place to another, they see things as they were, not as they are.--Neale E. Howard (The Telescope Handbook and Star Atlas)
- A century ago astronomers, geologists, chemists, physicists, each had an island of his own, separate and distinct from that of every other student of Nature; the whole field of research was then an archipelago of unconnected units. To-day all the provinces of study have risen together to form a continent without either a ferry or a bridge.--George R. Iles
- Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.--Joseph Wood Krutch ("March" The Twelve Seasons)
- Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.--Edwin Powell Hubble (The Nature of Science)
- Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.--John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty)
- Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.--Max Weber (Methodology of the Social Sciences)
- For in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man. Besides, the modern observations deprive all former writers of any authority, since if they had seen what we see, they would have judged as we judge.--Galileo Galilei (Frammenti e lettere)
- Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.--David Sarnoff
- The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think science can do anything, and those who are afraid it will.--Dixie Lee Ray (New Scientist 7/5/73)
- The history of science has proved that fundamental research is the lifeblood of individual progress and that the ideas that lead to spectacular advances spring from it.--Edward Victor Appleton
- How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?" Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."--Carl Sagan
- I like the scientific spirit--the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine--it always keeps the way beyond open.--Walt Whitman (in Walt Whitman's Camden Conversations by Traubel)
- I shall devote only a few lines to the expression of my belief in the importance of science ... it is by this daily striving after knowledge that man has raised himself to the unique position he occupies on earth, and that his power and well-being have continually increased.--Marie Curie
- The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.--Sir William Lawrence Bragg (in Beyond Reductionism by Koestler and Smithies)
- In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.--Galileo Galilei
- 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
- In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one's head about.--Loren Eiseley ("Science and the Sense of the Holy" The Star Trowner)
- It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.--Loren Eiseley (The Night Country)
- The key distinction between science and religion might well be the character of the questions they choose to ask. ... Religion asks "why," in the sense of the presumption of an underlying purpose, whereas science asks "how."--Lisa Randall (Knocking on Heaven's Door)
- Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.--John F. Kennedy (Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961)
- The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I've found it!") but "That's funny..."--Isaac Asimov
- Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.--Democritus of Abdera
- Nothing in science has any value if it is not communicated.--Anne Roe
- Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it.--Phillip Hauge Abelson ("The Roots of Scientific Integrity" Science 1963)
- The quick harvest of applied science is the usable process, the medicine, the machine. The shy fruit of pure science is Understanding.--Lincoln Barnett (Life, January 9, 1950)
- The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.--Isaac Asimov
- Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.--Albert Einstein
- Science differs from politics or religion, in precisely this one discipline: we agree in advance to simply reject our own findings when they have been shown to be in error.--Robert Pollack
- Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission.--Vannevar Bush (Science is Not Enough)
- Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.--Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.--Carl Sagan (Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science)
- Science is not ... a perfect instrument, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when taken as an end in itself.--Carl G. Jung (Commentary (on The Secret of the Golden Flower)
- Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.--Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
- Science is not to be regarded merely as a storehouse of facts to be used for material purposes, but as one of the great human endeavors to be ranked with arts and religion as the guide and expression of man's fearless quest for truth.--Sir Richard Arman Gregory
- Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.--Immanuel Kant
- Science is simply common sense at its best that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.--Thomas Henry Huxley
- Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.--Donald Knuth (Wired, November, 1999)
- Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all- the apathy of human beings.--Helen Keller
- Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.--Jules Verne (A Journey to the Center of the Earth)
- Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature.--Louis Orr (speech to the American Medical Association, 6/6/60)
- A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.--Max Planck
- Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon
he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.--Allen Ginsberg ("Poem Rocket," Kaddish and Other Poems)
- The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.--Claude Levi-Strauss
- The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant and continuous--all of us engage in it during all our waking hours the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them. One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science in the contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled wit awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation.--Ervin Laszlo
- Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.--Yoko Ogawa (The Housekeeper and the Professor)
- That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.--Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man)
- This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.--Thomas Carlyle (In Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History)
- The universe contains vastly more order than Earth-life could ever demand. All those distant galaxies, irrelevant for our existence, seem as equally well ordered as our own.--Paul Davies (in The Quickening Universe by Mallove)
- We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.--Martin Luther King, Jr. (Strength to Love)
- We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements ... profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.--Carl Sagan
- When you talk to young girls these days about their role modles, very few mention a chemist like Madame Curie or an astrophysicist and astronaut like Sally Ride, or a zoologist like Jane Goodall. Instead, they look to someone like Madonna...--Wynetka Ann Reynolds
- The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.--Stephen W. Hawking (A Brief History of Time)
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