Famous Quotes & Sayings

Kurt Vonnegut

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

Cynthia Kenyon

With science it's very important not to go down the wrong path, but the wrong path in science is a path you go down where everything you learn is already known. So you need to steer around the obvious.

Ernest Rutherford

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

Ernest Rutherford

Gentlemen, now you will see that now you see nothing. And why you see nothing you will see presently.

Ernest Rutherford

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

Ernest Rutherford

All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.

I want to do science fiction with dark stories.

Murray Gell-Mann

For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations. The beauty of the basic laws of natural science, as revealed in the study of particles and of the cosmos, is allied to the litheness of a merganser diving in a pure Swedish lake, or the grace of a dolphin leaving shining trails at night in the Gulf of California.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

Ken Jenkins

I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe.

Karl Pearson

The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.

Karl Pearson

The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

Karl Marx

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.

Karl Marx

Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.

Karl Marx

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

Mary McCarthy

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mark Twain

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.

Mark Twain

Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.

Mark Twain

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

Imre Lakatos

The great scientific achievements are research programmes which can be evaluated in terms of progressive and degenerative problemshifts; and scientific revolutions consist of one research programme superceding (overtaking in progress) another. This methodology offers a new rational reconstruction of science.

Harold E. Varmus

There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

Ivan Pavlov

Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.

H. G. Wells

Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.

H. G. Wells

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

H. G. Wells

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

H. L. Mencken

The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.

H. L. Mencken

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

H. L. Mencken

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.

Guglielmo Marconi

In the new era, thought itself will be transmitted by radio.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.