Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard P. Feynman

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Richard P. Feynman

Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.

Richard P. Feynman

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Richard P. Feynman

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

Richard P. Feynman

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. ... If you will simply admit that maybe [Nature] does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Richard P. Feynman

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

Richard Dawkins

Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.

Richard Whately

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

Richard P. Feynman

In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.

Richard Dawkins

The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.

James Grant

Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.

Eric Hoffer

The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.

Kevin Mitnick

Social engineering is using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person, a trusted insider within an organization, to comply with a request, and the request is usually to release information or to perform some sort of action item that benefits that attacker.

Henry Petroski

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

David Pogue

What is innovation if not our ticket to every business interest in the world? Its the ticket to solving the worlds problems - the energy problems, the pollution problems, the global warming problems. If it isnt for science and engineering, how will we compete in the new world?

Arthur Ganson

I happen to love engineering. I love figuring things out in a spatial sense, that whole realm of working with mechanical parts, and the relationship of the parts, and things like ratios and the speeds of particular objects.

Bruce Dickinson

Don't ask me to put up a shelf, but I love engineering.

Albert Einstein

Knowledge is limited; but imagination encircles the world.

Kate Winslet

'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series.

Richard P. Feynman

What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket.

Rob Bell

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

Richard Dawkins

Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.

Robin Wright

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that

Robert Nozick

The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.

Robert Rauschenberg

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.

Wallace Stevens

Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.