Quotes about science

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

— Mike Adams

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who can never remember where they left things.

— Woody Allen

Rather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.

— Thomas Arnold

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

— Antonin Artaud

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

— W. H. Auden

Science is but an image of the truth.

— Francis Bacon

Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.

— Amelia E. Barr

The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.

— Hilaire Belloc

In science as in love, too much concentration on technique can often lead to impotence.

— P. L. Berger

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

— Niels Bohr

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

— Georges Braque

Science knows only one commandment -- contribute to science.

— Bertolt Brecht

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

— Jacob Bronowski

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

— Jacob Bronowski

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.

— Jacob Bronowski

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

— Jacob Bronowski

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

— Jacob Bronowski

The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.

— Olympia Brown

I hate science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock-scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.

— Basil Bunting

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.

— William S. Burroughs

Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.

— Vannevar Bush

Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

— Samuel Butler

Science is but the exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.

— Lord Byron

O Star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there, to waft us home the message of despair?

— Thomas Campbell

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

— Thomas Carlyle

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.

— Raymond Chandler

The true science and study of man, is man himself.

— Pierre Charron

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

— Winston Churchill

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

— Arthur C. Clarke

Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [Animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph... Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

— Robin G. Collingwood

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

— Cyril Connolly

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

— David Cronenberg

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

— Rene Daumal

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

— John Dewey

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

— Denis Diderot

The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

— Benjamin Disraeli

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.

— John Donne

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

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Paul Ehrlich

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

— Albert Einstein

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

— Albert Einstein

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

— Albert Einstein

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.

— Albert Einstein

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

— Albert Einstein

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

— Albert Einstein

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

— Albert Einstein

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails.

— Albert Einstein

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

— Albert Einstein

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

— Albert Einstein

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Penelope Fitzgerald

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

— Keith Floyd

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.

— Benjamin Franklin

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.

— Erich Fromm

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

— James A. Froude

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

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.

— Eric Gill

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.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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.

— Stephen Jay Gould

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.

— Remy De Gourmont

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.

— Stephen Hales

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.

— Thomas Hardy

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.

— Friedrich August Von Hayek

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

— Robert Herrman

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.

— Alexander Herzen

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

— Thomas Hobbes

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.

— E. J. Hobsbawm

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.

— Ruth Hubbard

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.

— Ruth Hubbard

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

— Aldous Huxley

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.

— Aldous Huxley

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

— Thomas H. Huxley

Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

— Thomas H. Huxley

The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

— Thomas H. Huxley

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

— Thomas H. Huxley

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

— Henrik Ibsen

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

— Robert Green Ingersoll

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

— P. D. James

Man lives for science as well as bread.

— William James

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

— Lord Kelvin

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.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions -- largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

— Rudyard Kipling

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

— Paul Klee

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

— Arthur Koestler

Science is a game we play with God, to find out what his rules are.

— Cornelius Krasel

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

— Karl Kraus

In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

— Charles Lamb

Science is all metaphor.

— Timothy Leary

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

— Primo Levi

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

— Claude Levi-Strauss

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

— George Henry Lewes

When we say science we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.

— Wyndham Lewis