quotations about science
O star-eyed Science, hast thou wander'd there,
To waft us home the message of despair?
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Pleasures of Hope
Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.
JEAN ROSTAND
The Substance of Men
Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge--the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.
LISA RANDALL
Knocking on Heaven's Door
Science is a subordinate category. When science offers itself as the final stage or form of knowing, it is guilty of a false quantity, in that it puts the accent, which belongs elsewhere, upon the penultimate.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908
Leave your faith in science's hands
Research might lead to your salvation
While you're in a state of suspended animation
PESTILENCE
"Suspended Animation"
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance -- the idea that anything is possible.
RAY BRADBURY
Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1976
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, Clarke Foundation
So what is science, and why do we consider it so useful and important? Despite the Hollywood stereotypes, science is not about white lab coats and bubbling beakers or sparkling apparatuses. Science is a way of looking at the world using a specific toolbox--the scientific method.
DONALD PROTHERO
"The Holocaust, Denier's Playbook, and the Tobacco Smokescreen: Common Threads in the Thinking and Tactics of Denialists and Pseudoscientists", Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem
For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Adding a Dimension
In the history of science and throughout the whole course of its progress we see certain epochs following one another more or less rapidly. Some important view is expressed, it may be original or only revived; sooner or later it receives recognition; fellow workers spring up; the outcome of it finds its way into the schools; it is taught and handed down; and we observe, unhappily, that it does not in the least matter whether the view be true or false. In either case its course is the same; in either case it comes in the end to be a mere phrase, a lifeless word stamped on the memory.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
CARL SAGAN
Keynote address to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, 1987
Weird Science
Plastic tubes and pots and pans
Bits and pieces and
Magic from the hand
We're makin'
Things I've never seen before
Behind bolted doors
Talent and imagination
Not what teacher said to do
Makin' dreams come true
OINGO BOINGO
"Weird Science"
Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
I consider it an error in scientific communication that, most of the time, merely the polished and flawless results of natural research are displayed, as in an art show. And exhibit of the finished product alone has many drawbacks and dangers for both its creator and its users. The creator of the product will be only too ready to demonstrate perfection and flawlessness while concealing gaps, uncertainties and discordant contradictions of his insight into nature. He thus belittles the meaning of the real process of natural research. The user of the product will not appreciate the rigorous demands made on the natural scientist when the latter has to reveal and describe the secrets of nature in a practical way. He will never learn to think for himself and to cope by himself.
WILHELM REICH
Ether, God and Devil
Science is truth for life
Watch religion fall obsolete
Science Will be truth for life
Technology as nature
10,000 MANIACS
"Planned Obsolescence"
Science, for all its independent marvels, depends on sense. Science is a powerful tool, and like any other power tool, can be used well or badly. For it to foster understanding rather than constant confusion in this age of alternative and competing "truths" on every important topic, we need to use it more sensibly.
DAVID L. KATZ
"Science And Sense In A Post-Truth World: How Do We Know?", Huffington Post, September 29, 2017
Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it -- you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
Alas! A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections -- a mere heart of stone.
CHARLES DARWIN
letter to T. H. Huxley, July 9, 1857