Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Stuart Mill

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

John Stuart Mill

If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.

James Jeans

All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.

James Jeans

One must stand stiller than still. On reverse time travel.

James Jeans

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

James Hutton

In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.

Thomas A. Edison

To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.

Thomas A. Edison

I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.

Thomas Aquinas

It must be understood that prime matter, and form as well, is neither generated nor corrupted, because every generation is from something to something. Now that from which generation proceeds is matter, and that to which it proceeds is form. So that, if matter or form were generated, there would be a matter for matter and a form for form, endlessly. Whence, there is generation only of the composite, properly speaking.

Talcott Parsons

Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

Penelope Lively

I'm not an historian but I can get interested-obsessively interested-with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

Mark Akenside

SCIENCE! thou fair effusive ray From the great source of mental Day, Free, generous, and refin'd! Descend with all thy treasures fraught, Illumine each bewilder'd thought, And bless my labour'g mind.

Max Planck

The spectral density of black body radiation ... represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.

Max Planck

If E is considered to be a continuously divisible quantity, this distribution is possible in infinitely many ways. We consider, however-this is the most essential point of the whole calculation-E to be composed of a well-defined number of equal parts and use thereto the constant of nature h = 6.55 ×10-27 erg sec. This constant multiplied by the common frequency ? of the resonators gives us the energy element E in erg, and dividing E by E we get the number P of energy elements which must be divided over the N resonators.

Max Planck

Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

Max Planck

I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science.

Max Planck

Science advances one funeral at a time.

Max Planck

The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.

Max Planck

The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.

Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.

John F. Kennedy

As science, of necessity, becomes more involved with itself, so also, of necessity, it becomes more international. I am impressed to know that of the 670 members of this Academy

John F. Kennedy

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

Jonas Salk

IT IS SAID TO AWAIT CERTAINTY IS TO AWAIT ETERNITY.

Jonas Salk

The people - could you patent the sun ?

Jonas Salk

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed: It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

Joyce Carol Oates

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

Peter Medawar

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

Peter Medawar

The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

Peter Medawar

I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

Peter Medawar

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.

Peter Medawar

Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.

Peter Medawar

The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said-has been said-that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.

Peter Medawar

It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.