Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Charles Polanyi

Discoveries that are anticipated are seldom the most valuable. ... It's the scientist free to pilot his vessel across hidden shoals into open seas who gives the best value.

John Charles Polanyi

Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.

John Charles Polanyi

Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.

John Arbuthnot

John looked ruddy and plump, with a pair of cheeks like a trumpeter.

John Archibald Wheeler

In order to more fully understand this reality, we must take into account other dimensions of a broader reality.

Meaning comes from the correspondence between the code and its execution, and the compact underlying structure of the world and its dynamics.

The self is the resultant of the interest of the genes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Go on, fair Science; soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast; Her vulgar lingers formed a tree, But thou hast trained it to a post.

Newt Gingrich

It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.

Noam Chomsky

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

Murray Gell-Mann

For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations. The beauty of the basic laws of natural science, as revealed in the study of particles and of the cosmos, is allied to the litheness of a merganser diving in a pure Swedish lake, or the grace of a dolphin leaving shining trails at night in the Gulf of California.

Karl Pearson

The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

Marshall McLuhan

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

Marshall McLuhan

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Paul Auster

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof.

Paul Auster

In the old physics, three times two equals six and two times three equals 6 are reversible propositions. Not in quantum physics. Three times two and two times three are two different matters, distinct and separate propositions.

Paul Auster

It's like a mathematical law, Grace.

Nathan Fillion

I would cancel dialysis to be in the [hopefully upcoming Firefly] movie.

Kate Clinton

[On cloning sheep:] Oh great, just what we need - more sheep.

Mark Twain

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

Mark Twain

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.

Martin Heidegger

We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.

Mario Puzo

It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

Mary McCarthy

In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

Mark Twain

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.

Mark Twain

Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.

Mark Twain

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

Miguel de Unamuno

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.

Miguel de Unamuno

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

Miguel de Unamuno

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

Neil Armstrong

The [Moon] surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.

Neil Armstrong

No matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would be generally the same.

Naomi Klein

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.