quotations about science
The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
Scientists are supposed to be dispassionate, cool-headed, and unemotional when they evaluate their data. But it's hard for me to avoid a sense of awe when I'm hunting fossils.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
Science is my life. To live out here you need to know things. You need to be able to read the land and feel the changes. I call it a quiet voice. To really hear it and understand your sense of place and where you are.... You really need to clear your mind to hear it.
JASMINE GIL
"Science is my life", Juneau Empire, September 8, 2017
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out of My Later Years
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
STEPHEN HAWKING
A Brief History of Time
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook K", Aphorisms
Without the ontological assumption which goes with it, what is called science, is nothing but the dreamer's well-ordered dream.
GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD
Philosophy of Mind: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Psychology
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Descent of Man
Science has equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ -- an artificial organ -- his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being at the same time able to dilate to the dimensions of his body.
HENRI BERGSON
Centennial of Engineering: History and Proceedings of Symposia: 1852-1952
The meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning.
RUSSELL L. ACKOFF
Scientific Method: Optimizing Applied Research Decisions
The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know--it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
Science is ever self-corrective.
PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE
attributed, The World's Sages, Thinkers and Reformers
Although I was first drawn to math and science by the certainty they promised, today I find the unanswered questions and the unexpected connections at least as attractive.
LISA RANDALL
Warped Passages
Better for science that she should be free, in holy poverty, to go where she will and say what she knows, than that she should be hired out at so much a year to say things pleasing to the many, and to those who guide the many.
CHARLES KINGSLEY
"Soldiers of Science", The Works of Charles Kingsley
The success of science, both its intellectual excitement and its practical application, depend upon the self-correcting character of science. There must be a way of testing any valid idea. It must be possible to reproduce any valid experiment. The character or beliefs of the scientists are irrelevant; all that matters is whether the evidence supports his contention.
CARL SAGAN
Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind -- qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
speech at the Annual Wright Dinner at the Aero Club of Washington, 1949
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
What I Believe
One of the chief interests in Science is its bearing on [the] great questions: the light it throws on our own nature and the nature of the Universe; and the humility it teaches by everywhere leaving us in presence of the inscrutable. The dull world outside thinks of Science as nothing but a matter of chemical analyses, calculations of distance and times, labeling of species, physiological experiments, and the like; but among the initiated, those of higher type, while seeking scientific knowledge for its proximate value, have an ever-increasing consciousness of its ultimate value as a transfiguration of things, which, marvellous enough within the limits of the knowable, suggests a profounder marvel that cannot be known.
HERBERT SPENCER
An Autobiography
For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.
CHARLES KINGSLEY
"Soldiers of Science", The Works of Charles Kingsley