Quotations about Science
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. ~William Lawrence BraggEvery great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. ~John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men. ~Jean Rostand
Scientists should always state the opinions upon which their facts are based. ~Author Unknown
That theory is worthless. It isn't even wrong! ~Wolfgang Pauli
Louise: "How did you get here?"
Johnny: "Well, basically, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday."
~From the movie Naked
Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. ~Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1905
A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. ~Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual, 1965
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart. ~Walter Lippmann
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it. ~Alan Valentine
Science is simply common sense at its best. ~Thomas Huxley
Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things. ~Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"
Physics is imagination in a straight jacket. ~John Moffat
If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos. ~Robert Quillen
Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it. ~Albert Einstein
To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ~Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 1995
The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it. ~Robert L. Park, in The New York Times, 7 December 1999
The great men of science are supreme artists. ~Martin H. Fischer
It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof. ~John Desmond Bernal, The Origin of Life, 1967
Science is the topography of ignorance. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Medical Essays, 1883
Observations always involve theory. ~Edwin Hubble
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music. ~Lewis Thomas
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions. ~Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit, 1964
Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature. ~Martin H. Fischer
Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in their science. ~Henry David Thoreau
I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy. ~Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science, 1925
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. ~Bertrand Russell
In comparing religious belief to science, I try to remember that science is belief also. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law. ~William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1910
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue. ~Robert K. Merton, Social Theory, 1957
The whole history of physics proves that a new discovery is quite likely lurking at the next decimal place. ~F.K. Richtmeyer
There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible. ~Richard Davisson
The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its reply is that of physics. ~J.T. Fraser, Time, the Familiar Stronger, 1987
The quantum is that embarrassing little piece of thread that always hangs from the sweater of space-time. Pull it and the whole thing unravels. ~Fred Alan Wolfe, Star Wave: Mind Consciousness of Quantum Physics, 1984
The doubter is a true man of science; he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science. ~Claude Bernard
In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you. ~Frank Wilczek
There were two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand there was Einstein, and on the other all the rest. ~Rudolph Ladenburg
Science without conscience is the soul's perdition. ~François Rabelais, Pantagruel, 1572
