Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Except for the rare cases of plastid inheritance, the inheritance of all known cooacters can be sufficiently accounted for by the presence of genes in the chromosomes. In a word the cytoplasm may be ignored genetically.

Thomas Huxley

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

Thomas Huxley

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

Thomas Huxley

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

Thomas Huxley

It is a popular delusion that the scientific enquirer is under an obligation not to go beyond generalisation of observed facts...but anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond the facts, rarely get as far.

Thomas Huxley

I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything...

Thomas Huxley

Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Thomas Huxley

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

Thomas Huxley

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

Thomas Huxley

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

Thomas Huxley

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

Thomas Huxley

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Thomas Huxley

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Thomas Browne

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.

Timothy Leary

Science is all metaphor.

Thomas Sowell

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.

Thomas Sowell

Most variables can show either an upward or downward trend, depending on the base year chosen.

Thomas Sowell

Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster.

Thomas Sowell

All statements are true, if you are free to redefine their terms.

Thomas Sowell

All things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.

Sam Ervin

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

Sam Harris

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

Ronald Graham

Someone has said that all the great jugglers are dead.

Ronald Graham

I was reminded of the Sydney Harris cartoon that said 'adding two numbers that have not been added before does not constitute a mathematical breakthrough'.

Ronald Graham

AB=(1/4)((A+B)2-(A-B)2) is an amazing identity, and unfortunately I have to remind my current students how to prove it.

Ronald Fisher

It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence, rather than their occurrence, which becomes highly improbable.

Ronald Fisher

The best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.

Ronald Fisher

The statistician cannot excuse himself from the duty of getting his head clear on the principles of scientific inference, but equally no other thinking man can avoid a like obligation.

Rosa Luxemburg

[Geology] opens up such wide intellectual vistas and supplies a more perfectly unified and more comprehensive conception of nature than any other science.

Robert Green Ingersoll

The glory of science is, that it is freeing the soul, breaking the mental manacles, getting the brain out of bondage, giving courage to thought, filling the world with mercy, justice, and joy.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Rudyard Kipling

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions, largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

Samuel Johnson

The roads of science are narrow, so that they who travel them, must wither follow or meet one another...