Famous Quotes & Sayings

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.

Richard P. Feynman

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Richard P. Feynman

Unless a thing can be defined by measurement, it has no place in a theory. And since an accurate value of the momentum of a localized particle cannot be defined by measurement it therefore has no place in the theory.

Richard P. Feynman

It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

Richard P. Feynman

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Richard P. Feynman

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

Richard Whately

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

William S. Burroughs

They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.

William James

Man lives for science as well as bread.

Robin Williams

Clouds are like boogers hanging on the nostrils of the moon.

Robin G. Collingwood

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that ... he is going to be a beginner all his life.

Robert Sheckley

Science fiction is very healthy in its form.

Robert Sheckley

So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.

Robert Sheckley

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Robert Quillen

If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos.

Sarah Zettel

I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.

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.

William Herschel

I have looked farther into space than ever a human being did before me.

Walter Chrysler

It devolves upon the United States to help motorize the world.

Walter Bagehot

The maxim of science is simply that of common sense-simple cases first; begin with seeing how the main force acts when there is as little as possible to impede it, and when you thoroughly comprehend that, add to it in succession the separate effects of each of the incumbering and interfering agencies.

William Blake

Execution is the chariot of genius.

Wernher von Braun

The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.

Wernher von Braun

It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.

Wernher von Braun

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.

Wernher von Braun

Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department.

Werner Heisenberg

The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual.

Werner Heisenberg

Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

Werner Heisenberg

By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.