Famous Quotes & Sayings

Christopher Moore

Science, you don't know, looks like magic.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Who knows, the mind has the key to all things besides.

Daniel J. Boorstin

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

D. H. Lawrence

When science starts to be interpretive it is more unscientific even than mysticism.

D. H. Lawrence

...where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united...

Ambrose Bierce

A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

Ambrose Bierce

HOMŒOPATHIST, n. The humorist of the medical profession.

Ambrose Bierce

LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used ... as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great quantities.

Ambrose Bierce

RADIUM, n. A mineral that gives off heat and stimulates the organ that a scientist is a fool with.

Ambrose Bierce

PHRENOLOGY, n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.

Thomas Huxley

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

Thomas Huxley

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

Thomas Sowell

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

Robert Grosseteste

It is not possible for form to do without matter because it is not separable, nor can matter itself be purged of form.

Scott Adams

Science is a good thing. News reporters are good things too. But it's never a good idea to put them in the same room.

Scott Adams

Dilbert: I'm obsessed with inventing a perpetual motion machine. Most scientists think it's impossible, but I have something they don't. Dogbert: A lot of spare time? Dilbert: Exactly.

Thomas Jefferson

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Simone Weil

science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

Thomas Carlyle

Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.

Ronald Fisher

The best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.

Ronald Fisher

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Rosa Luxemburg

[Geology] opens up such wide intellectual vistas and supplies a more perfectly unified and more comprehensive conception of nature than any other science.

Steven Wright

I have a quantum car. Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost.

Steven Spielberg

I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.

Robert Boyle

The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.

Tom Stoppard

There would be this algebraic equation with an equals sign in the middle, and all the components would have different letters of the alphabet. It would come out right with x+z^2+t/q=y+co, and the co would be clothes off!

Tom Stoppard

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

Tom Hanks

From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go.

Sam Ervin

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

Sam Harris

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

Ronald Graham

Someone has said that all the great jugglers are dead.

Ronald Graham

I was reminded of the Sydney Harris cartoon that said 'adding two numbers that have not been added before does not constitute a mathematical breakthrough'.

Ronald Graham

AB=(1/4)((A+B)2-(A-B)2) is an amazing identity, and unfortunately I have to remind my current students how to prove it.