Quotes about science

"Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me, why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest, by cursed Cain's race invented be, and blest Seth vexed us with Astronomy."

Donne, John on science   

"Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature."

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan on science
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"Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids -- without any social relevance or human responsibility at all."

Ehrenreich, Barbara on science   

"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts."

Ehrlich, Paul on science   

"A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"The man of science is a poor philosopher."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."

Einstein, Albert on science
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"Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science"

Einstein, Albert on science   

"What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on science   

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"Do what we can, summer will have its flies."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on science   

"If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips."

Fitzgerald, Penelope on science   

"Neurophysiologists will not likely find what they are looking for, for that which they are looking for is that which is looking."

Floyd, Keith on science   

"Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence."

Franklin, Benjamin on science
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"The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix."

Fromm, Erich on science   

"Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive."

Froude, James A. on science   

"There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it."

Galbraith, John Kenneth on science   

"The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable."

Galbraith, John Kenneth on science   

"Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific."

Gill, Eric on science   

"Whether a person shows themselves to be a genius in science or in writing a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, or the deed, is living and can live on."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on science   

"The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on science   

"Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on science   

"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition."

Gould, Stephen Jay on science   

"Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius."

Gourmont, Remy De on science   

"Since we are assured that the all-wise Creator has observed the most exact proportions of number, weight and measure in the make of all things, the most likely way therefore to get any insight into the nature of those parts of the Creation which come within our observation must in all reason be to number, weigh and measure."

Hales, Stephen on science   

"Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it."

Hardy, Thomas on science   

"There are no better terms available to describe [The] difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former objective and the latter subjective. ... While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the facts of the social sciences are also opinions -- not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist."

Hayek, Friedrich August Von on science   

"Everywhere you look in science, the harder it becomes to understand the universe without God."

Herrman, Robert on science   

"Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it."

Herzen, Alexander on science   

"Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another."

Hobbes, Thomas on science   

"There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities."

Hobsbawm, E. J. on science   

"To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live."

Hubbard, Ruth on science   

"The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers independently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is cancelled out when the large picture is put together. This might conceivably be so if scientists were women and men from all sorts of different cultural and social backgrounds who came to science with very different ideologies and interests. But since, in fact, they have been predominantly university-trained white males from privileged social backgrounds, the bias has been narrow and the product often reveals more about the investigator than about the subject being researched."

Hubbard, Ruth on science   

"Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."

Huxley, Aldous on science
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"We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends."

Huxley, Aldous on science