Motivational Quotes

Science

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.

- Froude, James A.

Best Quotes about Science

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced -- by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.

Fromm, Erich

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Asimov, Isaac

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Kraus, Karl

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled Science Fiction and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Proverb, German

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

Rostand, Jean

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Konrad Lorenz

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Fitzgerald, Penelope

10.

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

Huxley, Thomas H.

11.

A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do -- but it does not keep him from doing it.

Clark, Frank A.

12.

When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.

Rostand, Jean

13.

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.

Sir Arthur Eddington

14.

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

Dante Alighieri

15.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.

Bronowski, Jacob

16.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Huxley, Thomas H.

17.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Dick, Philip K.

18.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

Ballard, J. G.

19.

Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Lorenz, Konrad

20.

The product of mental labor -- science -- always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Marx, Karl

21.

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.

Quincey, Thomas De

22.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

Billings, Josh

23.

In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.

Russell, Bertrand

24.

What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

25.

I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.

Nash, Ogden

26.

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

27.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Sophocles

28.

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

Bronowski, Jacob

29.

Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions of the body.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

30.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

31.

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

Ehrlich, Paul

32.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Hobbes, Thomas

33.

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

34.

Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

Diderot, Denis

36.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky

37.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

38.

A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

39.

Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Huxley, Thomas H.

40.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Koestler, Arthur

41.

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.

Burroughs, William S.

42.

Honor is the moral conscience of the great.

D'Avenant

43.

Science knows only one commandment -- contribute to science.

Brecht, Bertolt

44.

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs.

Sir Francis Darwin

45.

What a man calls his conscience is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.

Rowland, Helen

46.

Conscience is a man's compass.

Gogh, Vincent Van

47.

Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Pascal, Blaise

48.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

Dewey, John

49.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.

Levi, Primo

50.

The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer.

Mead, Margaret