Famous Quotes & Sayings

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

One could almost phrase the motto of our modern civilization thus: Science is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

...while science gives us implements to use, science alone does not determine for what ends they will be employed. Radio is an amazing invention. Yet now that it is here, one suspects that Hitler never could have consolidated his totalitarian control over Germany without its use. One never can tell what hands will reach out to lay hold on scientific gifts, or to what employment they will be put. Ever the old barbarian emerges, destructively using the new civilization.

Herbert Spencer

Only when Genius is married to Science can the highest results be produced.

Herbert Spencer

So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious-it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious.

Herbert Spencer

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Herbert Spencer

Science is organized knowledge.

Henry David Thoreau

It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man's will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterredby such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.

Henry David Thoreau

Linnæus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his "comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" and "gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable.

Henry David Thoreau

Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

Henry David Thoreau

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Hugh Miller

Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.

James Bryant Conant

The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks.

James Bryant Conant

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

Graham Parker

Sadly, my socks are like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike.

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.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste," at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The finest and healthiest thing about science is, as in the mountains, the brisk air blowing around in it.--The spiritually delicate (such as artists) shun and slander science owing to this air.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.

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

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

Richard Whately

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

Robert Sheckley

So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.

William Herschel

... finding that in [the Moon] there is a provision of light and heat; also in appearance, a soil proper for habitation fully as good as ours, if not perhaps better who can say that it is not extremely probable, nay beyond doubt, that there must be inhabitants on the Moon of some kind or other?

William Herschel

He broke through the barriers of the skies.

William Herschel

I have looked farther into space than ever a human being did before me.

William Blake

Execution is the chariot of genius.

Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

William Cowper

Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn, That he who made it, and reveal'd its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.