Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leonard Susskind

Science to me is sufficiently weird and interesting, and stranger than fiction.

Janna Levin

Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science.

John Pierce

This is what we do. We put together different sciences and technologies to make things.

Sarah Hall

I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.

Wait until you see the science that is going to come back from this mission. It's going to know your socks off.

Dmitri Mendeleev

The edifice of science not only requires material, but also a plan. Without the material, the plan alone is but a castle in the air-a mere possibility; whilst the material without a plan is but useless matter.

Dmitri Mendeleev

When the elements are arranged in vertical columns according to increasing atomic weight, so that the horizontal lines contain analogous elements again according to increasing atomic weight, an arrangement results from which several general conclusions may be drawn.

Dmitri Mendeleev

If all the elements are arranged in the order of their atomic weights, a periodic repetition of properties is obtained. This is expressed by the law of periodicity.

Dave Barry

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

Dave Barry

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.

Dave Barry

Here's a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then drop it into the water, and voilà (literally, "you have a compass")-you have a compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

David Sarnoff

I ... began my career as a wireless amateur. After 43 years in radio, I do not mind confessing that I am still an amateur. Despite many great achievements in the science of radio and electronics, what we know today is far less than what we have still to learn.

David Sarnoff

Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.

Carl Sagan

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

Carl Sagan

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Carl Sagan

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

Carl Sagan

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.

Carl Sagan

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

Carl Sagan

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

Carl Sagan

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Carl Sagan

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

Carl Sagan

But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.

Carl Sagan

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

Carl Sagan

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.

Carl Sagan

The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

Jonathan Miller

The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world.

Science is great, but it's got to be translational into a viable product.

I've been doing work on my science project.

Archilochus

Nothing can be sworn impossible since Zeus made night during mid-day, hiding the light of the shining Sun.

Barbara Kingsolver

Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.

Baruch Spinoza

Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.

Auguste Comte

Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.

Auguste Comte

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.