An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON SCIENCE 2
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
James A. Froude (1818-1894, British historian)
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642, Italian astronomer, mathematician)
Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.
Eric Gill (1882-1940, British sculptor, engraver, writer, typographer)
No one knows what he is doing so long as he is acting rightly; but of what is wrong one is always conscious.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
Whether a person shows themselves to be a genius in science or in writing a song, the only point is, whether the thought, the discovery, or the deed, is living and can live on.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.
Stephen Jay Gould
There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.
E. J. Hobsbawm (1917-, British historian)
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-, American author)
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 (1929-, American author)
Since we are assured that the all-wise Creator has observed the most exact proportions of number, weight and measure in the make of all things, the most likely way therefore to get any insight into the nature of those parts of the Creation which come within our observation must in all reason be to number, weigh and measure.
Stephen Hales
Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928, British novelist, poet)
The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.
Stephen Hawking (1942-, British theoretical physicist)
In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864, American novelist, short story writer)
There are no better terms available to describe the difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former "objective" and the latter "subjective." ... While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the "facts" of the social sciences are also opinions -- not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.'
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984, American playwright)
Everywhere you look in science, the harder it becomes to understand the universe without God.
Robert Herrmann (American scientist)
Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.
Alexander Herzen (1812-1870, Russian journalist, political thinker)
A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679, British philosopher)
Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679, British philosopher)
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplace, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983, American author, philosopher)
Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.
Doug Horton
The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers independently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is cancelled out when the large picture is put together. This might conceivably be so if scientists were women and men from all sorts of different cultural and social backgrounds who came to science with very different ideologies and interests. But since, in fact, they have been predominantly university-trained white males from privileged social backgrounds, the bias has been narrow and the product often reveals more about the investigator than about the subject being researched.
Ruth Hubbard (1924-, American biologist)
To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.
Ruth Hubbard (1924-, American biologist)
Science has "explained" nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)
I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895, British biologist, educator)
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895, British biologist, educator)
Science is simply common sense at its best -- that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895, British biologist, educator)
The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895, British biologist, educator)
It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906, Norwegian dramatist)
Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899, American orator, lawyer)
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
Henry James (1843-1916, American author)
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
P. D. James (1920-, British mystery writer)
Man lives for science as well as bread.
William James (1842-1910, American psychologist, professor, author)
Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.
C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953, British author, academic)
Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law within.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, German philosopher)
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Lord Kelvin
With a good conscience our only sure reward... let us go forth to lead the land we love... knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963, American President (35th))
We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968, American Civil Rights leader, Nobel Prize winner, 1964)
For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions -- largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936, British author of Prose, Verse)
The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.
Paul Klee (1879-1940, Swiss artist)
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
Arthur Koestler (1905-1983, Hungarian born British writer)
Science is a game we play with God, to find out what his rules are.
Cornelius Krasel
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
Karl Kraus (1874-1936, Austrian satirist)
Conscience: self-esteem with a halo.
Irving Layton (1912-, Canadian poet)
Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)
A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.
Alphonse De Lamartine (1790-1869, French poet, statesman, historian)
In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834, British essayist, critic)
Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.
Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801, Swiss theologian, mystic)
Science is all metaphor.
Timothy Leary (1921-1996, American actor)
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
Harper Lee (1926-, American author)
While conscience is our friend, all is at peace; however once it is offended, farewell to a tranquil mind.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762, British society figure, letter writer)
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
Charles Edward Montague (1867-1928, British author, journalist)
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing (1919-, British novelist)
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-, French anthropologist)
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
George Henry Lewes (1817-1878, British writer)
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 (1882-1957, British author, painter)
When we say "science" we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect; or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957, British author, painter)
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 (1742-1799, German physicist, satirist)
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg (1742-1799, German physicist, satirist)
Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974, American journalist)
A seared conscience is one whose warning voice has been suppressed and perverted habitually, so that eventually instead of serving as a guide, it only confirms the person in his premeditatedly evil course.
Robert J. Little
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 (1903-1989, Austrian zoologist, ethnologist)
Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis, best suited to open the way, to the next better one.
Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989, Austrian zoologist, ethnologist)
Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.
Lucretius (c.95-55 BC, Roman poet and philosopher)
Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.
Don Marquis (1878-1937, American humorist, journalist)
Natural science will, in time, incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will, in time, incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
Karl Marx (1818-1883, German political theorist, social philosopher)
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 (1818-1883, German political theorist, social philosopher)
In science, all facts no matter how trivial, enjoy democratic equality.
Mary McCarthy (1912-1989, American author, critic)
There's not a whole lot of new atoms out there.
Denny McDonough
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 (1901-1978, American anthropologist)
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956, American editor, author, critic, humorist)
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 (1608-1674, British poet)
Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.
Maria Mitchell (1943-, Canadian singer, songwriter)
My conscience aches but it's going to lose the fight.
Alannah Myles (Canadian singer)
I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.
Ogden Nash (1902-1971, American humorous poet)
There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.
Ogden Nash (1902-1971, American humorous poet)
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 (1642-1727, British scientist, mathematician)
Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)
A sword in the hands of a drunken slave is less dangerous than science in the hands of the immoral.
Iranian Proverb
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 (1623-1662, French scientist, religious philosopher)
Conscience is the chamber of justice.
Origen (c.185-c.254, Egyptian Christian biblical scholar, theologian)
Science has not solved problems, only shifted the points of problems.
Charles H. Parkhurst (1842-1933, American clergyman, reformer)
Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one another -- 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
Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662, French scientist, religious philosopher)
There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895, French scientist who developed pasteurization)
There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There is science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895, French scientist who developed pasteurization)
Conscience has nothing to do as lawgiver or judge; but is a witness against me if I do wrong, and which approves if I do right. To act against conscience is to act against reason and God's Law.
Arthur Phelps
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 (1928-, American author)
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 (BC 427?-347?, Greek philosopher)
Science is nothing but perception.
Plato (BC 427?-347?, Greek philosopher)
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 (1881-1963, Italian head of Roman Catholic order)
One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744, British poet, critic, translator)
Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.
Karl Popper (1902-1994, Australian philosopher)
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 subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
Richard Powers
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