Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention

Henry David Thoreau

The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.

Henry David Thoreau

Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

Harold Wilson

[Criticizing as "appalingly complacent" a Conservative Government report that by the '60s, Britain would be producing all the scientists needed] Of course we shall, if we don't give science its proper place in our national life. We shall no doubt be training all the bullfighters we need, because we don't use many.

Harold Wilson

We are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution ... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry.

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.

Hortense Calisher

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

Gottfried Leibniz

What is is what must be.

Gottfried Leibniz

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

James D. Watson

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

James D. Watson

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

James D. Watson

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

James Bryce

Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.

James Bryant Conant

Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuos development of new concepts.

James Bryant Conant

... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

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.

Jacques Derrida

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Harry Shearer

I was a Political Science major.

Fred Hoyle

Science is prediction, not explanation.

Fred Hoyle

A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

Frank Herbert

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

George Henry Lewes

Science is not addressed to poets.

Graham Parker

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

Isaac Barrow

An accomplished mathematician, i.e. a most wretched orator.

Isaac Asimov

Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny...

Isaac Asimov

A neat and orderly laboratory is unlikely. It is, after all, so much a place of false starts and multiple attempts.

Isaac Asimov

A scientist is as weak and human as any man, but the pursuit of science may ennoble him even against his will.

Isaac Asimov

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Isaac Asimov

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Immanuel Kant

The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.

Immanuel Kant

Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.