Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Ian Hacking

Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.

Ian Hacking

Philosophers of science constantly discuss theories and representation of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world. This is odd, because 'experimental method' used to be just another name for scientific method.... I hope [to] initiate a Back-to-Bacon movement, in which we attend more seriously to experimental science. Experimentation has a life of its own.

Harold E. Varmus

There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

Ivan Pavlov

Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.

H. G. Wells

Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.

H. G. Wells

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?

H. G. Wells

Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians.

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.

H. L. Mencken

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

H. L. Mencken

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event.

Guglielmo Marconi

In the new era, thought itself will be transmitted by radio.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.