An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON SCIENTISTS
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
Mike Adams
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought -- particularly for people who can never
Woody Allen (1935-, American director, screenwriter, actor, comedian)
Rather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.
Thomas Arnold (1795-1842, British educator, scholar)
But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948, French theater producer, actor, theorist)
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
W. H. Auden (1907-1973, Anglo-American poet)
Science is but an image of the truth.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626, British philosopher, essayist, statesman)
The microbe is so very small: You cannot take him out at all.
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953, British author)
Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.
Amelia E. Barr (1831-1919, Anglo-American novelist)
In science as in love, too much concentration on technique can often lead to impotence.
P. L. Berger
If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
Niels Bohr (1885-1962, Danish physicist)
Science knows only one commandment -- contribute to science.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956, German dramatist, poet)
Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974, British scientist, author)
It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another; if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say "Publish and be damned."
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974, British scientist, author)
No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974, British scientist, author)
Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974, British scientist, author)
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974, British scientist, author)
The more we learn of science, the more we see that its wonderful mysteries are all explained by a few simple laws so connected together and so dependent upon each other, that we see the same mind animating them all.
Olympia Brown (1835-1926, American women's suffrage leader)
I hate science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock-scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.
Basil Bunting (1900-1985, British poet)
They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997, American writer)
Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of simple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.
Vannevar Bush
Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
Samuel Butler (1612-1680, British poet, satirist)
Science is but the exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.
Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)
O Star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there, to waft us home the message of despair?
Thomas Campbell (1777-1844, Scottish poet)
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881, Scottish philosopher, author)
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science, art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959, American author)
The true science and study of man, is man himself.
Pierre Charron (1541-1603, French philosopher)
Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936, British author)
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936, British author)
The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965, British statesman, Prime Minister)
Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-, British science fiction writer)
Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut animals up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph... "Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?"
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954, French author)
A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.
Robin G. Collingwood (1889-1943, British historian, philosopher)
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974, British critic)
Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.
David Cronenberg (1943-, Canadian filmmaker)
When you are identifying science of the motion of water, remember to include under each subject its application and use, so that the science will be useful.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519, Italian inventor, architect, painter, scientist, sculptor)
Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.
Rene Daumal (1908-1944, French poet, critic)
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey (1859-1952, American philosopher, educator)
Faith is a fine invention when Gentleman can see -- but microscopes are prudent in an emergency.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886, American poet)
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784, French philosopher)
The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, British statesman, Prime Minister)
Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me, why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest, by cursed Cain's race invented be, and blessed Seth vexed us with Astronomy.
John Donne (1572-1632, British metaphysical poet)
Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930, British author, "Sherlock Holmes")
Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids -- without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-, American author, columnist)
A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-, American economist)
There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-, American economist)
Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as an association as possible.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
The man of science is a poor philosopher.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)
Do what we can, summer will have its flies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-, British author)
Neurophysiologists will not likely find what they are looking for, for that which they are looking for is that which is looking.
Keith Floyd
Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790, American scientist, publisher, diplomat)
The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.
Erich Fromm (1900-1980, American psychologist)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679, British philosopher)
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)
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)
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)
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Lord Kelvin
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)
In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834, British essayist, critic)
Science is all metaphor.
Timothy Leary (1921-1996, American actor)
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
Charles Edward Montague (1867-1928, British author, journalist)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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
A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.
Jean Rostand (1894-1977, French biologist, writer)
It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.
Jean Rostand (1894-1977, French biologist, writer)
Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.
Jean Rostand (1894-1977, French biologist, writer)
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
Jean Rostand (1894-1977, French biologist, writer)
Science is for those who learn; poetry is for those who know.
Joseph Roux (1834-1905, French priest, writer)
Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money off them.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.
John Ruskin (1819-1900, British critic, social theorist)
Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted? Or does (such a society) necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970, British philosopher, mathematician, essayist)
In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970, British philosopher, mathematician, essayist)
Science is what you know; philosophy what you don't know.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970, British philosopher, mathematician, essayist)
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
George Santayana (1863-1952, American philosopher, poet)
Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)
Science is always wrong; it never solves a problem without creating ten more.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
Adam Smith (1723-1790, Scottish economist)
Science is organized knowledge.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903, British philosopher)
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745, Anglo-Irish satirist)
The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.
Edward Teller (American physicist and author)
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact or the description of one actual phenomenon to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect, but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through, it is not comprehended in its entireness.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.
Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910, Russian novelist, philosopher)
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
Miguel De Unamuno (1864-1936, Spanish philosophical writer)
Isn't it marvelous how those scientists know the names of all those stars?
Author Unknown
Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
Paul Valery (1871-1945, French poet, essayist)
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Paul Valery (1871-1945, French poet, essayist)
Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, Austrian philosopher)
If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966, British novelist)
To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.
Simone Weil (1910-1943, French philosopher, mystic)
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg (1933-, American nuclear physicist)
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