Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gertrude Stein

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

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.

Fred Hoyle

Earlier theories ... were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. [Coining the "big bang" expression.]

Fred Hoyle

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

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.

George Henry Lewes

The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

George Henry Lewes

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

George Henry Lewes

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

Graham Parker

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

Imre Lakatos

The great scientific achievements are research programmes which can be evaluated in terms of progressive and degenerative problemshifts; and scientific revolutions consist of one research programme superceding (overtaking in progress) another. This methodology offers a new rational reconstruction of science.

J. William Fulbright

We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

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

The dangers that face the world can, every one of them, be traced back to science. The salvations that may save the world will, every one of them, be traced back to science.

Isaac Asimov

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Isaac Asimov

Where any answer is possible, all answers are meaningless.

Isaac Asimov

When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion - the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

Isaac Asimov

Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.

Isaac Asimov

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

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.

The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize.

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.

Immanuel Kant

In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.

Immanuel Kant

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.