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"I shall mention Nissl’s name as often as scientific works by him on the topic under discussion are known to me. However, Nissl’s share in these studies does not end with that. The amicable scientific interactions which I was allowed to entertain with him over the last 15 years have given me so much stimulation that I must concede – to give but one example – that none of the following ideas that might enhance our knowledge has been conceived without his direct or indirect participation. This does not preclude the fact that Nissl may well disagree with some views expressed here.”
-Alois Alzheimer, [Praising Franz Nissl and his strong influence on his work]
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"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
-Archimedes, Pappus of Alexandria
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Science can be introduced to children well or poorly. If poorly, children can be turned away from science; they can develop a lifelong antipathy; they will be in a far worse condition than if they had never been introduced to science at all.
-Isaac Asimov
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"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere."
-Isaac Asimov
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Though science can cause problems, it is not by ignorance that we will solve them.
-Isaac Asimov
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When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
-W. H. Auden
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The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their public monuments or from their domestic relics. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic reveals an entire society, just as a skeleton of an ichthyosaur suggests an entire creation. Everything is deducible, everything is linked. The cause allows one to guess the effect, just as each effect allows one to reconstruct a cause. The scientist can resuscitate in this manner even the warts of ancient times. From this comes without doubt the prodigious interest that an architectural description can inspire when the writer's fantasy is faithful to its basic elements. Cannot each person reattach it to its past by rigorous deductions? And as for man, does not the past singularly resemble the future? Tell him what was and is this not almost always the same thing as telling him what will be?
-Honore de Balzac, The Search for the Absolute
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Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.
-Dave Barry
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My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.
In 1860 the famous duel between T.H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce took place, and the wife of the bishop of Worcester is reported to have said this in reaction to hearing Darwin’s theory of evolution.
-Bishop of Worcester, wife
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The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists was science itself.
-Jacob Bronowski
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It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz, this is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge or error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."
... We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
-Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, (passage spoken at Auschwitz)
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The true science and study of man is man.
-Pierre Charron
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If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
-Arthur C. Clarke
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The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.
Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
-Michael Crichton, © Michael Crichton, "Aliens Cause Global Warming", Speech, California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA), January 17, 2003
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We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.
-Marie Curie, Lecture at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
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It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?
-Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow; Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Houghton Mifflin Co., November, 1998
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"Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination."
-John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty
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I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.
-Freeman Dyson
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The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
-Albert Einstein, Telegram, May 24, 1946
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One needn't be a crank to miss the scientific boat. The very paragon of genius, Albert Einstein, couldn't be persuaded to give quantum physics his unreserved endorsement. Here is Einstein's most frequently paraphrased statement of dissatisfaction with the theory: Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory yields a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secret of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that He doesn't play dice.
-Albert Einstein, Letter to Max Born, December 4, 1926
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"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."
-Albert Einstein, On relativity
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"Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. The value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age."
-Richard Feynman
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We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
-Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1966
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There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.
-Stephen Hawking, A Brief History Of Time, "Elementary Particles And The Forces Of Nature", 1996
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Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
-Thomas Hobbes
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Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind–that my own highest aspirations even–lead me towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.
Science has taught to me the opposite lesson. She warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile.
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/letters/60.html
-Thomas Henry Huxley, Letter to Charles Kingsley, September 23, 1860
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The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles.
-Samuel Johnson
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Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
-Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
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In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
-William Osler
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Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find t he right solution, the just solution of international problems, not the effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible.
-Linus Pauling
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"The priest persuades a humble people to endure their hard lot, a politician urges them to rebel against it, and a scientist thinks of a method that does away with the hard lot altogether."
-Max Percy
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"There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be."
-Charles Sanders Pierce
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"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
-Maxwell Planck
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Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man’s mental history, while the latter, after a fitful flickering existence among the Greeks and Arabs, suddenly sprang into importance in the sixteenth century, and has ever since increasingly moulded both the ideas and institutions among which we live.
-Bertrand Russell, , Religion and Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1935
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It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
-Carl Sagan
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This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
-Jonas Salk
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Anthropology is the only discipline that can access evidence about the entire human experience on this planet.
-Michael Brian Schiffer
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In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.
-Herbert Spencer
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Books about Science
