Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ivar Giaever

Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.

Ivar Giaever

'Incontrovertible' is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.

David Hanson

I was always into science fiction as a kid. I loved science and tinkering with things.

William Gibson

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

Carl Sagan

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Carl Sagan

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

Carl Sagan

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Carl Sagan

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.

Gerrit Smith

As this is the first time I have had the floor, it may be well for me now to confess, that I am in the habit of freely imputing errors to my fellow-men.

Clint Eastwood

Other than obvious errors like forgetting a line, often I can't see any difference between take one and take 20.

Carl Sagan

Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . .

Carl Sagan

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)

Carl Sagan

They (i. e., the Pythagoreans ) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors.

Carl Sagan

We are prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.

Bertrand Russell

Who ever heard a theologian preface his creed, or a politician conclude his speech with an estimate of the probable error of his opinion?

Bertrand Russell

More cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.

Bertrand Russell

Why repeat the old errors, if there are so many new errors to commit?

X. J. Kennedy

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

Yann Martel

I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.

Imelda May

I'm not comparing myself at all to him, but I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know.

Idris Elba

Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.

Gad Elmaleh

When you succeed, at a certain point, you want to challenge yourself. Otherwise, you become boring. You become a has-been. It's not very interesting. I don't want to be this guy who has only succeeded in France. I could say, 'O.K., that's it; merci.' But I'm not interested in that.

Gail Carriger

I like certain subgenres within science fiction and fantasy, and one of those is urban fantasy, and another is steampunk.

Gilbert Hernandez

I grew up being really insecure and dumped on, over-feeling certain things in a negative way. So I thought I had something to prove.

Donald Trump

Owning great landmarks such as the Empire State Building or Trump Tower or the General Motors Building or the Plaza Hotel - there are certain just spectacular landmarks - it's an honor; it's really an honor.

Zadie Smith

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.