Quotes about science

The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of decency. The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

— Wyndham Lewis

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

If it can't be expressed in figures, it's not science it's opinion.

— Lazarus Long

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

— Konrad Lorenz

Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

— Konrad Lorenz

Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.

— Don Marquis

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

— Karl Marx

The product of mental labor -- science -- always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

— Karl Marx

In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality.

— Mary Mccarthy

There's not a whole lot of new atoms out there.

— Denny McDonough

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

— Margaret Mead

From man or angel the great Architect did wisely to conceal, and not divulge his secrets to be scanned by them who ought rather admire; or if they list to try conjecture, he his fabric of the heavens left to their disputes, perhaps to move his laughter at their quaint opinions wide hereafter, when they come to model heaven calculate the stars, how they will wield the mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive to save appearances, how gird the sphere with centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, and epicycle, orb in orb.

— John Milton

Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.

— Maria Mitchell

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have Certainty without any proof.

— C. E. Montague

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

— John Von Neumann

I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

— Sir Isaac Newton

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Science has not solved problems, only shifted the points of problems.

— Charles H. Parkhurst

Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other -- only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

— Talcott Parsons

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

— Blaise Pascal

There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.

— Louis Pasteur

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

— Louis Pasteur

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 -- 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

— Robert M. Pirsig

If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.

— Plato

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

— Plato

Science is nothing but perception.

— Plato

Nevertheless, in order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizations and influence them from within. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capable and skilled in the practice of his own profession.

— Pope John XXIII

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

— Alexander Pope

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

— Karl Popper

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

— Richard Powers

Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.

— Edgar Quinet

It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.

— Jean Rostand

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

— Jean Rostand

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

— Jean Rostand

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

— Jean Rostand

When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.

— Jean Rostand

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

— Joseph Roux

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

— John Ruskin

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

— Bertrand Russell

Science is what you know, philosophy what you don't know.

— Bertrand Russell

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

— Bertrand Russell

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

— Bertrand Russell

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

— George Santayana

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

— George Bernard Shaw

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.

— George Bernard Shaw

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

— Adam Smith

Science is organized knowledge.

— Herbert Spencer

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

— Jonathan Swift

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

— Edward Teller

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

— Henry David Thoreau

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

— Count Leo Tolstoy

Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

— Mark Twain

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

— Miguel De Unamuno

Isn't it marvelous how those scientists know the names of all those stars?

— Source Unknown

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

— Paul Valery

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

— Paul Valery

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

— Evelyn Waugh

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

— Simone Weil

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

— Steven Weinberg

Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

— Isaac Asimov

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

— Isaac Asimov

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

— J. G. Ballard

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

— Philip K. Dick

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

— Joan Didion

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.

— Eric Hoffer

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

— Doris Lessing

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

— Susan Sontag

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us; and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us from without.

— Joseph Addison

A good conscience is a continual feast.

— Francis Bacon

Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.

— George Bancroft

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

— Sir Max Beerbohm

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

— Josh Billings

The chief prerequisite for a escort is to have a flexible conscience and an inflexible politeness.

— Countess of Marguerite Gardiner Blessington

The conscience is the sacred haven of the liberty of man.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

— Christian Nevell Bovee

The conscience is the most flexible material in the world. Today you cannot stretch it over a mole hill; while tomorrow it can hide a mountain.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

— Samuel Butler

No ear can hear nor tongue can tell the tortures of the inward hell!

— Lord Byron

It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.

— William Ellery Channing

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right.

— Winston Churchill

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do -- but it does not keep him from doing it.

— Frank A. Clark

If you look into your own heart, you find nothing wrong there, what is there to fear?

— Confucius

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

— Cyril Connolly

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

— Joseph Cook

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

— William Cowper

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

— Dante Alighieri

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

— D'Avenant

Rules of society are nothing; ones conscience is the umpire.

— Madame Dudevant

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

— George Eliot

There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its length: a quiet conscience.

— Euripides

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

— William Faulkner

Conscience -- the only incorruptible thing about us.

— Henry Fielding

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

— Michel Foucault

If a superior give any order to one who is under him which is against that man's conscience, although he do not obey it yet he shall not be dismissed.

— St. Francis of Assisi