Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Kuhn

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

Thomas Kuhn

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

Thomas Kuhn

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

Thomas Jefferson

Freedom, the first-born of science.

Raymond Loewy

A designer must always think about the unfortunate production engineer who will have to manufacture what you have designed; try to understand his problems.

Raymond Loewy

It would seem that more than function itself, simplicity is the deciding factor in the aesthetic equation. One might call the process beauty through function and simplification.

Russell Baker

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1000 miles an hour... and my head pointing down into space with nothing between me and infinity but something called gravity which I can't even understand, and which you can't even buy any place so as to have some stored away for a gravityless day...

Ronald Ross

The Panama Canal was dug with a microscope.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

Tony Visconti

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

Tony Snow

That said, ID does not qualify as science because it gives us nothing to test or measure. Science requires replicable tests involving measurable variables.

Tony Snow

Sure, science involves trial and error. Scientists refine theories each day. But as they do, they help us grasp more clearly the wonders of the world and the universe.

Hans Selye

The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement.

Harlan Ellison

People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?

Otto von Bismarck

Politics is no exact science.

William Faulkner

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Willard Van Orman Quine

The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

Ronald Reagan

[A woman waiting for him in the Kremlin asked Gobachev] "Was communism invented by a politician or a scientist?" [He replied] "Well, a politician." She said, "That explains it. The scientist would have tried it on mice first."

Saint Augustine

Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.

Xenophanes

All things that come into being and grow are earth and water.

Xenophanes

For we are all sprung from earth and water

Xenophanes

Truly the gods have not from the beginning revealed all things to mortals, but by long seeking, mortals discover what is better.

Winston Churchill

This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension. We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations, and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe, may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.

William Temple

Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.

Will Rogers

With old inflation riding the headlines, I have read till I am bleary-eyed, and I can't get head from tails of the whole thing. ... Now we are living in an age of explanations-and plenty of 'em, too-but no two things that's been done to us have been explained twice the same way, by even the same man. It's and age of in one ear and out the other.

Zhuangzi

That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.

Sandra Postel

Pervasive depletion and overuse of water supplies, the high capital cost of new large water projects, rising pumping costs and worsening ecological damage call for a shift in the way water is valued, used and managed.

Wallace Stevens

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

William Herschel

... finding that in [the Moon] there is a provision of light and heat; also in appearance, a soil proper for habitation fully as good as ours, if not perhaps better who can say that it is not extremely probable, nay beyond doubt, that there must be inhabitants on the Moon of some kind or other?

William Herschel

The heavens are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden, which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds.

William Herschel

We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.

William Herschel

He broke through the barriers of the skies.