Science Quotes

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

[My study of the universe] leaves little doubt that life has occurred on other planets. I doubt if the human race is the most intelligent form of life.

There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

I have come with this message: since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so too?

The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

When scientific conversations cease, then dogma rather than knowledge begins to rule the day.

It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones.

The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race.

I did not feel a particularly strong call to any one subject, but read voraciously and widely and began to find science interesting.

Then we'll work a hundred years without physics and chemistry.

A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens, indeed, they will not be able to safeguard their existence on this earth.

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

The mathematician knows some things, no doubt, but not those things one usually wants to get from him.

The creative scientist studies nature with the rapt gaze of the lover, and is guided as often by aesthetics as by rational considerations in guessing how nature works.

Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science. Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone.

How can he possibly be humble? He hasn't done anything yet.

I know little about nature and hardly anything about men.

Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. God is subtle, but he is not malicious.

New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise: So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try.

It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.

It is one of the triumphs of human wit ... to conquer by humility and submissiveness ... to make oneself small in order to appear great ... such ... are often the expedients of the neurotic.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, Rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies, Tangled in a silver braid.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

To bother about the best method of accomplishing an accidental result.

Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

I am a physician. I keep a drug-shop of lies. I give relief, consolation. Can one console and relieve without lying? ... Only women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men.

Until Systers came into existence, the notion of a global community of women in computer science did not exist.

Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.

Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.

Nothing in science has any value if it is not communicated.

I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

Philosophy begins with wonder.

The science that studies the supreme good for man is politics.

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin ... will obtain the clearest view of them.

No science ever defends its first principles.

Metaphysics is universal and is exclusively concerned with primary substance. ... And here we will have the science to study that which is, both in its essence and in the properties which it has.

Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning.

But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end.