Science Quotes

We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

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

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

Life became a science when interest shifted from the dissection of dead bodies to the study of action in living beings and the nature of the environment they live in.

My father was a lawyer and to my best knowledge nobody in my family before had interest in science.

Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

I've never owned a telescope, but it's something I'm thinking of looking into.

Next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.'

You know something I could really do without? The Space Shuttle. ... It's irresponsible. The last thing we should be doing is sending our grotesquely distorted DNA out into space.

Doing science is not inherently incompatible with religious faith.

People tend not to disassociate the technological issues from pure scientific research, so that science sometimes gets a bad name for things that science doesn't deserve having a bad name for.

Christianity has always had sort of an ability to absorb the developments in science. But, it's always done it very slowly.

Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.

Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

Science is not addressed to poets.

Mathematicians do not write for the circulating library.

If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will, But-there must be risks! There must be. In experimental work there always are!

To render aid to the worthless is sheer waste. Rain does not freshen the Dead Sea, but only enables it to dissolve more salt.

Ten builders rear an arch, each in turn lifting it higher; but it is the tenth man, who drops in the keystone, who hears our huzzas.

Truth is better disengaged from error than torn from it.

Is any knowledge worthless? Try to think of an example.

A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.

Evolution pays and that is why there is evolution

A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, and leaves embody geometry?

Error held as truth has much the effect of truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets many confident predictions.

When we try to imagine a chaos we fail. ... In its very fiber the mind is an order and refuses to build a chaos.

Discovery begins by finding the discoverer.

The frontispiece of Mr. Lyell's book is enough to throw a Wernerian into fits.

Because we [people] have an intellect, part of what we do is try to understand the "intelligent design." Everything we don't know is "intelligent design." Everything we do know is science.

science is the most revolutionary force in the world.

Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.

And fragile is thy tenure of this world Still haunted by the monstrous ghost of God. ("To Science")

What's needed today, now, more than ever, is 'Star Peace' for there is an ominous, mutual threat to all science fiction. It's called 'Twilight'. And it is really, really bad.

Without the ontological assumption which goes with it, what is called science, is nothing but the dreamer's well-ordered dream.

I have faith, as I did when I announced my stem-cell decision in 2001, that science and ethics can coexist.

Embryonic stem-cell research requires the destruction of life to create a stem cell. That's why I think we've got to be very careful in balancing the ethics and the science.

A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

Not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never die; it need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and becomes two new amoebas.

Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

I think I know what is bothering the students. I think that what we are up against is a generation that is by no means sure that it has a future.